Debra Kaye's Blog, page 2

Anarcho-innovation – Staying Ahead of the Curve

The controlled chaos of Red Thread Thinking may be the best way for companies to innovate effectively – and efficiently.

IBM talked to more than 1500 CEOs from 60 countries and 33 industries worldwide, and learned that by an overwhelming margin they believed that innovative thinking more than anything else was the key to successfully navigating an increasingly complex world — and keeping their businesses ahead of the curve.

It didn’t surprise me since I hear it all the time — entrepreneurs and brand managers tell me the same thing. “We need to innovate better.” Time and again, I see companies trying to institutionalize the innovative process, depending on the same old methods of generating ideas and solutions that result in banal groupthink that can damn many projects from the get-go.

For instance, traditional brainstorming is largely ineffective. Conventional focus groups, if not organized and led properly, can result in faulty intelligence. Leaving innovation to only certain people or departments means you’re missing out on the talent of a lot of smart people in your organization.

These missteps are often part of a company’s attempt to rigidly hold to corporate protocol, management hierarchies and strict rules. Trouble is the “that’s the way we do it here” attitude can end up costing big money in mistakes or missed opportunities.

Stop Brainstorming

Brainstorming doesn’t unlock creativity; instead, it stifles it. Numerous studies reveal that brainstorming groups think of fewer ideas than people working alone, and group performance gets worse as size increases. Moreover, the ideas brainstorming groups do come up with are often predictable and unoriginal — humdrum word association writ large.

Part of what we know about neuroscience explains why formal brainstorming fails. The brain can’t make the necessary connections needed for brilliant insight in a rigid environment. There’s too much pressure and too much influence. People instinctively mimic others’ innovation opinions, leading to suggestions and thoughts that are “safe”… and stale.

The moratorium on any criticism (“There’s no such thing as a dumb question!” “No answer is wrong!”) may be the model’s biggest flaw. Like giving every kid in the third grade a trophy whether or not he or she deserves one, accepting everyone’s ideas and contributions as completely equal, doesn’t challenge people to work harder, think bigger and look more deeply at the problem at hand.

Debate and criticism help generate the flow of ideas — not hinder it — because they force us to consider other perspectives and question our own assumptions. If you’re not creating an atmosphere where differing perspectives clash in unpredictable ways and draw from (seemingly) unrelated connections you simply can’t get out of that box you desperately want to escape. Example: Apple structures its departments to work together as a unit so that all the groups — from design to manufacturing to sales — interact continuously, sharing and generating ideas in what’s called concurrent or parallel production.

Focus Group Fuzz

Do consumers really know what they’re talking about when you get them in a room with a two-way mirror? Are they really going to voice their opinions when they feel as if they are back in a classroom and eager to impress or please the “teacher.” It depends. A focus group done right, with the correct demographic pertinent to your inquiry, and the right leader, who knows how to lead a group in a way that gets to root issues and answers and who asks the right questions, is crucial. And this is an art as much as it is a science. In the right situation a focus group is very effective in parsing out deeply held consumer beliefs and feelings.

That’s why it’s not enough to fill a room with people and start asking them questions or giving them false choices. Be sure you’ve got the right people putting your focus group together.

A large toy manufacturer held such a focus group with children in an effort to come up with a hit toy for the next holiday buying season. They showed prototypes of two toys in the running, and the kids definitively preferred one to another. The company developed the preferred toy, and it was an abject failure once it hit store shelves. Why? Because the kids were comparing the toy to the one other toy in the room, not to the many toys kids get to choose from in a toy department. Sure, between the two of them, one was a clear winner but why would anyone think that would translate to the preferences people show in a real-life buying situation where myriad toys compete for a buyer’s attention?

A focus group needs to stimulate feelings about real-life scenarios and actual consumer behaviors and this one didn’t.

Getting Caught in the Trend Trap

Those who look to trends to inform their future plans fail — although it’s easy to understand why trends are so seductive to innovation-starved companies. They look like no-fail winners, with an already proven success story in the marketplace.

The trouble is by the time a company creates something based on a trend, many others may have already jumped on the bandwagon. You end up being last in, and as a result, forgettable or indistinguishable from what’s gone before. Or worse, people have moved on to some other trend and you’re stuck with a lot of stuff representing the old trend. That’s what happened to Kraft when it introduced its Carb Wells line of low-carb foods in 2004, when the low-carb fad was beginning to wane. Too much, too late: most of the products were off the shelf very quickly.

Red Thread Thinking

Organizations need to consider allowing what I call anarcho-innovation to take hold in their innovation efforts. In politics, anarchy is considered the ideal, or the absence of government and absolute freedom of the individual, free of fear or reprisal. In innovation, it’s allowing team members to use their strengths to challenge assumptions and unearth information in a variety of ways, and then form connections between data — again without fear.

I call it Red Thread Thinking. It means having a certain amount of confidence in your team – and the ability to let go of your notions of hierarchy and who’s an expert and who isn’t. In fact, your entire staff should be thinking this way “on the job” — and all the time. It’s the best way to have insights and make connections between seemingly disparate events or information, which lead to brilliant innovation.

First, the innovation team should be made up of your best thinkers from a variety of departments with complimentary and even competing skills and interests. Don’t create a team of the “usual suspects” — give people chances who don’t usually participate in innovation or development projects.

Make sure there is a good mix of age and background, because a team of 35-year olds with the same educational background and cultural frame of reference will come up with predictable and similar ideas and insights. Next, give one or two members of the team one of five “threads” to pull on their own before they come back to the team to weave them together.

One or two people should spend some time alone “playing”, indulging their curiosities and visualizing futures. Another member or two on the team should do what I call a “deep dive” — and go back into the history of the organization to find out what was done, discarded, or developed but not to the point of implementation. Often times, the past is a lush feeding ground for fresh ideas.

You can see how the anarcho-innovative process of Red Thread Thinking assumes a certain amount of chaos — and that precisely suits the spontaneous, unpredictable nature of innovation. Obviously, I’ve t scratched the surface of how it’s done. It takes practice to develop the ability to look at data and make the right connections. However, when team members become good at seeing shared information as filaments to be connected in certain revealing ways, brilliant insights and innovation happen. Sparks fly and arguments ensue in an environment where everyone has the right to disagree, challenge, correct, and advocate for his or her point of view with respect – but without fear.

And everyone might even get and deserve a trophy…

This article appears in the May/June issue of The Executive Magazine of California Society of Association Executives.

Anarcho-innovation

The controlled chaos of Red Thread Thinking may be the best way for companies to innovate effectively – and efficiently.

IBM talked to more than 1500 CEOs from 60 countries and 33 industries worldwide, and learned that by an overwhelming margin they believed that innovative thinking more than anything else was the key to successfully navigating an increasingly complex world — and keeping their businesses ahead of the curve.

It didn’t surprise me since I hear it all the time — entrepreneurs and brand managers tell me the same thing. “We need to innovate better.” Time and again, I see companies trying to institutionalize the innovative process, depending on the same old methods of generating ideas and solutions that result in banal groupthink that can damn many projects from the get-go.

For instance, traditional brainstorming is largely ineffective. Conventional focus groups, if not organized and led properly, can result in faulty intelligence. Leaving innovation to only certain people or departments means you’re missing out on the talent of a lot of smart people in your organization.

These missteps are often part of a company’s attempt to rigidly hold to corporate protocol, management hierarchies and strict rules. Trouble is the “that’s the way we do it here” attitude can end up costing big money in mistakes or missed opportunities.

Stop Brainstorming

Brainstorming doesn’t unlock creativity; instead, it stifles it. Numerous studies reveal that brainstorming groups think of fewer ideas than people working alone, and group performance gets worse as size increases. Moreover, the ideas brainstorming groups do come up with are often predictable and unoriginal — humdrum word association writ large.

Part of what we know about neuroscience explains why formal brainstorming fails. The brain can’t make the necessary connections needed for brilliant insight in a rigid environment. There’s too much pressure and too much influence. People instinctively mimic others’ innovation opinions, leading to suggestions and thoughts that are “safe”… and stale.

The moratorium on any criticism (“There’s no such thing as a dumb question!” “No answer is wrong!”) may be the model’s biggest flaw. Like giving every kid in the third grade a trophy whether or not he or she deserves one, accepting everyone’s ideas and contributions as completely equal, doesn’t challenge people to work harder, think bigger and look more deeply at the problem at hand.

Debate and criticism help generate the flow of ideas — not hinder it — because they force us to consider other perspectives and question our own assumptions. If you’re not creating an atmosphere where differing perspectives clash in unpredictable ways and draw from (seemingly) unrelated connections you simply can’t get out of that box you desperately want to escape. Example: Apple structures its departments to work together as a unit so that all the groups — from design to manufacturing to sales — interact continuously, sharing and generating ideas in what’s called concurrent or parallel production.

Focus Group Fuzz

Do consumers really know what they’re talking about when you get them in a room with a two-way mirror? Are they really going to voice their opinions when they feel as if they are back in a classroom and eager to impress or please the “teacher.” It depends. A focus group done right, with the correct demographic pertinent to your inquiry, and the right leader, who knows how to lead a group in a way that gets to root issues and answers and who asks the right questions, is crucial. And this is an art as much as it is a science. In the right situation a focus group is very effective in parsing out deeply held consumer beliefs and feelings.

That’s why it’s not enough to fill a room with people and start asking them questions or giving them false choices. Be sure you’ve got the right people putting your focus group together.

A large toy manufacturer held such a focus group with children in an effort to come up with a hit toy for the next holiday buying season. They showed prototypes of two toys in the running, and the kids definitively preferred one to another. The company developed the preferred toy, and it was an abject failure once it hit store shelves. Why? Because the kids were comparing the toy to the one other toy in the room, not to the many toys kids get to choose from in a toy department. Sure, between the two of them, one was a clear winner but why would anyone think that would translate to the preferences people show in a real-life buying situation where myriad toys compete for a buyer’s attention?

A focus group needs to stimulate feelings about real-life scenarios and actual consumer behaviors and this one didn’t.

Getting Caught in the Trend Trap

Those who look to trends to inform their future plans fail — although it’s easy to understand why trends are so seductive to innovation-starved companies. They look like no-fail winners, with an already proven success story in the marketplace.

The trouble is by the time a company creates something based on a trend, many others may have already jumped on the bandwagon. You end up being last in, and as a result, forgettable or indistinguishable from what’s gone before. Or worse, people have moved on to some other trend and you’re stuck with a lot of stuff representing the old trend. That’s what happened to Kraft when it introduced its Carb Wells line of low-carb foods in 2004, when the low-carb fad was beginning to wane. Too much, too late: most of the products were off the shelf very quickly.

Red Thread Thinking

Organizations need to consider allowing what I call anarcho-innovation to take hold in their innovation efforts. In politics, anarchy is considered the ideal, or the absence of government and absolute freedom of the individual, free of fear or reprisal. In innovation, it’s allowing team members to use their strengths to challenge assumptions and unearth information in a variety of ways, and then form connections between data — again without fear.

I call it Red Thread Thinking. It means having a certain amount of confidence in your team – and the ability to let go of your notions of hierarchy and who’s an expert and who isn’t. In fact, your entire staff should be thinking this way “on the job” — and all the time. It’s the best way to have insights and make connections between seemingly disparate events or information, which lead to brilliant innovation.

First, the innovation team should be made up of your best thinkers from a variety of departments with complimentary and even competing skills and interests. Don’t create a team of the “usual suspects” — give people chances who don’t usually participate in innovation or development projects.

Make sure there is a good mix of age and background, because a team of 35-year olds with the same educational background and cultural frame of reference will come up with predictable and similar ideas and insights. Next, give one or two members of the team one of five “threads” to pull on their own before they come back to the team to weave them together.

One or two people should spend some time alone “playing”, indulging their curiosities and visualizing futures. Another member or two on the team should do what I call a “deep dive” — and go back into the history of the organization to find out what was done, discarded, or developed but not to the point of implementation. Often times, the past is a lush feeding ground for fresh ideas.

You can see how the anarcho-innovative process of Red Thread Thinking assumes a certain amount of chaos — and that precisely suits the spontaneous, unpredictable nature of innovation. Obviously, I’ve t scratched the surface of how it’s done. It takes practice to develop the ability to look at data and make the right connections. However, when team members become good at seeing shared information as filaments to be connected in certain revealing ways, brilliant insights and innovation happen. Sparks fly and arguments ensue in an environment where everyone has the right to disagree, challenge, correct, and advocate for his or her point of view with respect – but without fear.

And everyone might even get and deserve a trophy…

This article appears in the May/June issue of The Executive Magazine of California Society of Association Executives.

Big Business Eyes Small Makers as Path to Economic Growth: Walmart Is the Conduit

I am a board member of Count Me In, a non-profit that helps women-owned businesses succeed, and was fortunate to be part of an exclusive one-day session this month to help small business entrepreneurs learn what it takes to really scale up. The goal: to get five or six of these companies selling their wares to Walmart.

Five of the top 100 million dollar sellers to Walmart shared what they know to go from a garage-based business to a mega-manufacturer. The 15 invited entrepreneurs who want to prep their products for the retail giant’s buyers included everything from a stylus that makes attaching crystals to any surface fast and easy to point-of-sale vacuum packed individual diapers.

Turnaround titan Lynn Tilton, CEO of Patriarch Partners; clothing mogul Mark Adjmi, CEO of Adjmi Apparel Group; expert “closer” Joey Setton, executive vice president of Saramax Apparal Group; licensing wiz Yehuda Shmidman, CEO of Sequential Brands Group; and event co-sponsor Ariela Balk, founder and CEO of lingerie and swimwear brand Smart & Sexy, are committed to helping small businesses as a path to economic growth, but in a decidedly new way – not by small, step-by-step growth, but by getting these businesses into market-flexing, broad-based sales from the get-go.

The intense session came on the heels of Walmart’s announcement about its commitment to buy an additional $50 billion in U.S. products over the next 10 years. For small business accustomed to producing quantities in the low thousands, the opportunity to supply tens of thousands of products to 3400 Walmart stores can be either a dream come true or a nightmare if they are not prepared for the retailer’s expectations. The panel shared advice for making such a major transition in both production and strategy – and it’s applicable to any producer who has dreamed of getting a crack at Walmart’s 138 million weekly shoppers.

Make sure your product fits Walmart, Walmart doesn’t have to fit your product. The five panelists agreed on three basics for anyone considering selling to Walmart: Does your product appeal to WalMart customers; does it fill a void on the retailer’s shelves; and are you willing and able to get your costs low enough to be both profitable and meet Walmart’s strict pricing strategy?

Infrastructure has to meet order demands. Working with Walmart “is a round the clock job and if you are not ready for that you should put off your effort to get on store shelves,” said Balk, who ships 60 million garments out a year – many of them to Walmart. “Can you handle replenishment needs, logistics, and turnaround times? If you don’t have the staff to handle those things, the burden will fall on you,” she says. If you can’t hold up your end of the deal, your first chance may be your last. That’s why Balk waited five years before making a deal with Walmart for her Smart & Sexy line. “I needed to understand what I needed to deliver in terms of quality and pricing and what kind of staffing was needed to meet those goals.”

Yehuda Shmidman said if you don’t have manufacturing capabilities consider licensing your product to a manufacturer, as a way to scale your business to meet Walmart’s volume demands. “You may be great at marketing but if you can’t make money from production you are out of business,” according to Shmidman. “That’s the business we’re in – we may not be able to find the best factories but we know how to build brands.”

Know the true cost of your product. It can be challenging to meet Walmart’s pricing needs, which are lower than most small entrepreneurs are used to, especially if they don’t know what the product actually costs to make. “People often under-estimate the cost to produce their product and the overhead required to run their business,” said Lynn Tilton. “It startles me that so many smart people don’t know the true cost of making their product. It’s beyond cost of goods. Every company has to have a pricing model on every product. What is your wholesale cost? Do you have discounts? Will you take returns? What’s your overhead? Do you need inspectors on the ground?” she said. Walmart, for instance, demands that manufacturers’ factories comply with their standards, and inspectors are necessary to ensure compliance. Those people cost money, which has to be worked into your bottom line.

Ferociously prepare. Once you’ve got an appointment with Walmart, do your homework. “Before your first one hour meeting with a buyer you need to put in 100 hours of research,” said Adjmi. That means visiting the departments where your product will likely be stocked and really studying them – the layout, stock, traffic pattern, shoppers in the aisle – everything. It also means familiarizing yourself with Walmart’s supplier expectations, which are detailed on its website. “A lot of people say, ‘I know my business’ but that’s just half the game. I’ve seen these people get blown away in Walmart meetings because they don’t understand what they need to know to answer Walmart’s questions: What does the competition look like? Do your factories match Walmart’s expectations? What margins are you expecting to get? Where will the product fit into the existing category mix in the stores? Is it a regional product, good for 500 stores as opposed to 2500 stores?” Not only do you need to know your product better than anyone, you need to know Walmart better than your competitor. “If you don’t, stay home and reschedule the appointment,” says Adjimi.

Have confidence, yet be humble. You can know everything about your product and as much as possible about Walmart’ needs but there’s always that question that seems to come at you from the side. “Don’t make up an answer,” advised Balk. “Tell them the truth – say “I don’t know but I’ll get back to you tomorrow,’ and then find the answer and get back to them.”

Never leave without a deal. “In order for your company to have revenue you have to sell something,” was Joey Setton’s advice – which may seem like a no-brainer but often times the small manufacturer can be so overwhelmed that they don’t leave a buyer meeting with a purchase order in hand. “The biggest impediment to closing is not focusing on what the buyer is saying,” said Setton. He told the story of a salesman who went into Walmart with a great product displayed on a beautiful glossy easel board. Setton was excited because he really thought they had a home run. “My colleague talked about the items and price points. He was doing a great job. At one point the buyer said, ‘Oh that’s a really cute item and she started writing notes about. But my salesman kept going, talking about more items, flipping the easel board past that item the buyer was so intrigued with.” Setton stepped in and reengaged the buyer on the product she liked. “We spent about 45 minutes talking about how many she would take per store, even though there were 40 other products on the easel display to talk about.” Ultimately, they only got through five or six pages but they wrote orders because Setton listened to the buyer and wasn’t only concerned with getting through the entire product line. “If a buyer is saying, ‘stop I like this’ then stop because it’s likely you’ll get the order. Your job is not just try to sell, you have to close.”

Passion and Persistence Drive Successful Entrepreneurship

Look at the most successful entrepreneurs you know and you’ll likely discover the overriding traits of passion and persistence. Winners have a deep passion for what they are doing and keep at it until they achieve their goals. This inner drive, rather than the desire to make money, is a critical component of their success. Think of Edison, Jobs, Dell, Hewlett and Packard, who all started out simply doing something they felt compelled to do. They persisted in looking everywhere for solutions to their challenges.

Love what you are doing or your mind will never be open to the connections you can make, and you will cut yourself off from simple solutions you might otherwise have uncovered. Passion helps nurture, strengthen, and grow what may have been gut instinct or “a hunch” into something powerful and profound.  It is not blind allegiance to an idea. It’s the willingness to experiment, explore, invest energy, hit a dead end, and then chase a new direction that allows you to refine, revise, alter and grow good ideas. Doing interesting things requires effort. It’s no surprise that without passion, a drive connected to our heart, we often abandon something challenging for simpler, more predictable pursuits.

Success demands connecting to your personal motivations and desires to reach beyond your doubts and outside naysayers. You must recognize mistakes, make revisions, rethink and retool. Steve Jobs said, “About half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.”  Passion motivates you and is essential for convincing others about your ideas. Persistence harnesses that passion into work and entrepreneurship.

People may think your new idea is crazy.  You may not want to hear what they are saying, but some naysayers could be identifying real problems. You have to learn to listen, be willing to change, reinvent, revise and dig deeply into your idea.  Without sustained passion, everything else fades away.  You don’t want to end up kicking yourself when someone else devises something similar because they persevered to that one small breakthrough that made it all worthwhile.

Post-it Notes is a now legendary tale. Dr. Spence Silver at 3M unintentionally created weak glue, but he didn’t just throw it away.  He wondered what it might be good for, and kept that glue around, periodically asking friends and colleagues whether it could be useful.  Years later, his friend, Art Fry, imagined sticky paper for his music notations because his bookmarks kept falling out of the hymnal volumes, and Post-it Notes were born.

That Great Mind Is Yours

What does it take to be a rapid-fire idea generator and solve problems in unique ways? A lot less then you think. It’s really about being open and having a positive attitude.

Thought is about making new combinations from existing elements.  So being a great observer and looking at life with a positive, curious mind are really what it takes to enable great ideas to pop into your head.  Openness and positivity mean that the next time a burr sticks to your sweater, instead of saying, “Uh-oh, a burr,” and discarding it, you might say, “Oh, a burr…look how it sticks….that’s useful,” and then go on to invent Velcro.  In the first and more common instance, the reaction focuses on the object’s typical function and its annoying or negative implications (the sweater has a pull in it).  The second reaction focuses on the possibilities of the function beyond the sweater.

Intuition comes from a correlative ability to understand how memories, observations, facts and feelings can best be brought to bear on the problem at hand. This ability to connect seemingly disparate events into cohesive, original thoughts doesn’t come from talent, just practice.  The most original and surprising ideas come from making hidden and distant connections.

Being intuitive is not reserved for a few special people, but some people are more practiced at allowing their minds to clear and recapture the images and ideas that flow through them. The fact is that we’re all intuitive beings; we just need to give ourselves a chance.

There are remarkably simple and fun ways to open yourself up to generating new ideas.  More than two decades ago, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi proposed the concept of “flow” to describe the energized focus that characterizes the mind at its most productive. “Flow” is not like “laserlike focusing” or the miraculous illumination of a sudden brainstorm. It is more the feeling of what I call “bubbling up” or being carried in a direction because something is brewing, percolating in surprising ways, with an effervescence of bubbles and whirls of water moving forward, up and out.

Ideas Happen Here

There are many ways to jump-start your thinking when you’re working on solving a problem or looking for a new idea or business venture.  Nothing works all the time, but there are two kinds of activities that help the most.

One is freeing your mind completely by engaging in a “mindless” activity that allows your brain to relax and expand.  Hot baths, long walks, even doing household chores can work.  The second is actually exercising your brain so that it becomes stronger and better at innovating.

The type of brain workout is important. You may be surprised to learn that crossword puzzles and memory games may not challenge your neurons if they aren’t difficult enough. Repeating already-learned skills makes you better at those skills, but it apparently doesn’t improve cognition.

New and challenging tasks stimulate the brain most and help to grow cognition. Researchers at the University of Hamburg subjected 20 young adults to one month of intense training in juggling. They found an increase in the corresponding gray matter in the brain as early as seven days after the training began. The added gray matter receded when the training was stopped, though the participants were still able to juggle.  There are others—learning a musical instrument, learning a new language, studying for a difficult exam or understanding and memorizing the Latin name of plants – that could be the gateway to your next brilliant epiphany. Remember, it was a calligraphy class taken in college for enrichment that eventually led Steve Jobs to install a series of attractive fonts in his Mac computer. Had he never taken the class, he probably would not have understood the beauty and functionality of different styles of type, and that memory would not have existed years later when he was developing the Mac.

Why Does Innovation Scare Us?

Innovation is a word that feels big.  It scares us because it signifies dramatic change, and that can be overwhelming to many of us. We also shy away from innovation because it seems reserved for geniuses with special knowledge about complicated stuff. That’s because we often hear about innovation linked to strides in science or technology – and not everyone has access to or feels at home in those two worlds.

Let’s put an end to these two irrational fears right now, and get you over the innovation paralysis that could be holding you back from developing ideas into great products.

Change means entering the realm of the unknown and if you can’t predict the future, you’re going to feel very uneasy.  But the best innovations are not based on what’s not known, they are based on an understanding of the past, and the here and now (“culture”) and making judgments and informed decisions based on that knowledge.

Innovation also puts the fear of failure into many people’s minds. So what? Innovation failures are learning experiences. Each one teaches you what doesn’t work and what might work the next time around. Thomas Edison went through many failed light bulbs before he found one that worked.  Chefs try dozens of ingredient combinations before they come up with a winning recipe for a delicious cookie.

Fear of loss and leaving our comfort zone is another reason people hesitate to go out on a limb with an idea.  Change is too often associated with loss – loss of colleagues, familiar routines, and comfortable surroundings.  You have to turn the tables on “losses” and start seeing them as “gains” – when I innovate I always make new friends and meet new colleagues, am introduced to exciting practices and skills, and often learn about and visit interesting environments.

Innovation also implies risk – I can’t argue with this.  You are taking a risk when you develop something new and then ask people to try it. Today technology (computer modeling, communication, etc.) allows us to minimize financial investments and losses and do experimentation very affordably.

If you’re still not convinced, consider other risks you’ve taken, for a new job or a better salary, or to meet someone new.  Didn’t the benefits of the risks that paid off outweigh (and out number) the risks that didn’t pay off? And for those failed risks, didn’t you learn something you applied successfully to your next venture?

Finally, don’t get stuck on the notion that innovation is limited to science, technology or medicine. These are innovations that make headlines – but you don’t have to change the world in a laboratory or from Silicon Valley. Start thinking of innovation as nothing more than problem-solving.  Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor Eric von Hippel discovered millions of regular people modify existing products in order to solve a problem or improve an item’s functionality – providing numerous examples of basic ways in which people transform things into new items that serve specific needs.  Many of these modifications or complete re-dos could very well become the next big hit on store shelves.  That’s the next step – taking an idea to the people.

Once you embrace innovation, make innovative thinking and problem solving part of your every day routine. Remember, inventiveness begets inventiveness.

 

Why Innovation Is Part of the American Spirit

Innovation occurs when individuals formulate new ideas by making connections among observations, experiences, facts, history, and feelings that initially may seem unrelated—but are—to uncover fresh, brilliant insights.  We all have the power to design and develop thoughts into practical, market-capturing products and services that will improve everyday living.

As Americans, we are hard-wired to innovate.  It’s in our DNA.  It’s an archetypical American cultural value.  Not only do we have a deep-seated belief in the possibility of personal invention and reinvention — the idea that we can make ourselves anew — but we also believe it is our right to do so. It is our right to invent and reinvent an identity for ourselves, hence the popularity of Snapchat and Instagram, where we share the latest versions of ourselves with our friends.  It gets our juices flowing, to think of the best versions of ourselves, and then make it happen. We want to live longer, live better, live bigger.

Americans hold dear the philosophy that we can always improve.  We can build a better mousetrap.  Take away the idea of innovation and you take away the very fiber upon which we have built our communities.  The cultural aspect of innovation is crucial to understanding why it will never go away, or be diminished.

We believe in personal, social, and psychological mobility — all part of our belief in a culture of mobility.  That is, that we can change social classes, that we are free to uproot our lives and move physically, that we are psychologically flexible enough to adapt, to take advantage of the serendipitous occurrence, and that we can make change to improve ourselves and others.  We can invent a new way to be, and this cuts across all ages and lifestyles.

Innovation runs deep in the American psyche, and it continues to be strong and successful as we grow older.  Teens are cutting apart off-the-rack purchases and creating their own clothing.  Millennials are taking to the blogosphere to create jobs for themselves.  Boomers are particularly proud that they are not living their parents’ versions of their 50s or 60s.  They are more active, more involved, and more innovative.  According to Duke University scholar Vivek Wadhwa, who looked at 549 people who started successful technology companies, the average age of the founders was 40.  Wadhwa also found that older entrepreneurs have higher success rates than their younger counterparts when they start companies. With acumen based on years of experience and practice, they have more knowledge and memories to draw on to synthesize new information, and a greater ability to anticipate problems.  As we age, our use of complex reasoning skills improves – good for innovation, and imperative for a marketable product.

Real growth and real change will come from the free flow of innovation ideas from America’s individuals – of all ages — into its businesses. MIT professor Eric von Hippel noted that millions of people become inventive to solve a problem with existing products or to improve functionality.

What’s the change you want to see?  Get started.  You can be innovative, spark the engines of business and of our economy.

Trend Spotting Is Treacherous

It may be alluring to innovate based on trends, but it’s a trap. Those who look to trends to inform their future plans often miss the mark.  Trends are seductive to innovation-starved companies because they look like no-fail winners with an already proven success story in the marketplace.

The trouble is by the time a company creates something based on a trend, many others may have already jumped on the bandwagon. You end up being last in, and as a result, forgettable or indistinguishable from what’s gone before.  Or worse, people have moved on to some other trend and you’re stuck with a lot of stuff representing the old trend. That’s what happened to Kraft when it introduced its Carb Wells line of low carb foods in 2004, when the low-carb fad was beginning to wane.  Too much, too late: most of the products were off the shelf very quickly.

Copycats also find themselves trying to compete on price, as the single distinguishing feature that might appeal to consumers.  The danger is that there is always someone who can undercut you on cost, so a sales strategy based on price alone is a futile effort.

Reality Just May Not Be What You Think It Is 

The attraction to trends and the feeling that they are part of a longer term ingrained behavior rather than a more superficial passing fad can be explained by work done by psychologist Larry Jacoby in his article “Becoming Famous Overnight.” “The experience of familiarity has a simple but powerful quality of ‘pastness’ that seems to indicate that it is a direct reflection of prior experience,” he wrote. Given the generally large amount of press coverage dedicated to new trends or predictions by trend watchers, it is quite likely that this familiarity gives a sensation of “it’s always been so” and an illusion of consumer experience that will continue

rather than something more ephemeral.

Professor of psychology and Nobel Prize winner (in economics) Daniel Kahneman coined the term WYSIATI—what you see is all there is. He composed it because we tend to jump to conclusions on the basis of limited evidence. Moreover, we are prone to overestimate how much we understand about the world, and this “overconfidence is fed by the illusory certainty of hindsight.” This is why it is so important that we really dig down and study the past, because without this attention to detail and evidence, we can be insensitive to information.

What is interesting about the WYSIATI rule is that it also helps explain why it is sometimes so difficult to go back, dig deeply, and look for connections, a critical factor for innovation success. Kahneman suggests that we have an “almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.” So we deal with limited information happily, as if it were all we need to know, and build the best possible narrative from that. The better the story, the more we tend to believe it.  It’s easier, too, to construct a story when there are fewer data points that have to be fit into the puzzle.

Smart businesses that follow Red Thread Thinking understand that culture informs the underlying root drivers of behavior, the unspoken aspects of what’s beneath the surface.  This makes entrepreneurs and brands more prescient about what consumers will do next.  There you’ll find that shifts in consumer behavior actually materialize quite slowly.  For example, the shift toward wellness, which includes mind/body health awareness and flexible work schedules, is now a cultural obsession, but it started way back in the 60’s, even though it seems so topical today.  Another shift that has long been underway is consumers’ desire for greater freedom and easier access to entertainment and discovery.  That’s exactly what Apple understood with the iPod.  Instead of just designing a better-looking music player, Apple eliminated barriers and connected consumers to buying and sharing music in a single step.  Now it owns the delivery of digital music via iTunes.

Innovation Begins Individually Far Away from Traditional Brainstorming Sessions

Brainstorming, which owes its popularity to Madison Avenue adman Alex Osborn, who pioneered the concept at BBDO in the 1950s, has provided a convenient group-based structure for generating ideas. A focus on free association in a criticism free environment is the basis of the model, which is still popular everywhere from classrooms to boardrooms today.

However, it’s not all that it’s cracked up to be. Problem is brainstorming doesn’t unlock creativity; instead, it stifles it. Numerous studies reveal that brainstorming groups think of fewer ideas than people working alone, and group performance gets worse as size increases.



Part of what we know about neuroscience explains why formal brainstorming fails. The brain can’t make the necessary connections needed for brilliant insight in a rigid environment. There’s too much pressure and too much influence. People instinctively mimic others’ opinions, leading to suggestions and thoughts that are often predictable and stale.

Moreover, the absence of criticism, one of Osborn’s central tenets, is the model’s biggest flaw. Debate and criticism help generate the flow of ideas—not hinder it—because they force us to consider other perspectives and challenge our own. Repetition stifles creativity. The key is in the interaction: differing perspectives clashing in unpredictable ways, drawing from (seemingly) unrelated connections. Example: Apple, which structures its departments to work together as a unit. Chaotic, no doubt, but all the groups—from design to manufacturing to sales—interact continuously, sharing and generating ideas in what’s called concurrent or parallel production.

Studies show that some people may be more productive and creative in solitude, which is why a complementary approach, combining elements from the social and the solitary, is most successful in creating a stimulating environment. 3M has been on the front lines of encouraging individual innovation since the 1970s with its “15 percent time”—the program that lets employees use a portion of their paid time to tinker with their own thoughts and ideas. The policy has produced some of the company’s bestselling products, including Post-it Notes.

Google allows employees to spend up to 20 percent of their time working on personal projects as part of its Innovation Time Off initiate. According to Marissa Mayer, former vice president of search products and user experience (now Yahoo CEO), half of all new product launches at the company—Gmail and Google News, for example—have come from the program.

Whether in a group setting or in solitude, innovation begins with the individual. Most make the mistake of equating innovation with revolutionary breakthroughs. It’s much more than just cutting-edge technology, however. People innovate every day, often right from their kitchen tables. Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Eric von Hippel studied household innovation in the United Kingdom and found that 6.1 percent of adults, or 2.9 million people, had created or modified a product or object to be more efficient.

Unique ideas blossom best when your brain is relaxed and engaged in something other than the task at hand. Steamy showers, ambling walks—anything other than rigid brainstorming sessions. These remove us from the mundanity of modern life (the bills, the housework) and put us in a more “associative” state. This is when serendipity happens; your mind ties new threads together to form new ideas.

The spontaneous, unpredictable nature of innovation makes it ill-advised to try to plan or structure it in advance. That’s why traditional brainstorming is ineffective; it’s useful for expanding and refining ideas, sure, but not generating them.

5 Tips To Be An Innovation Genius

Did you know great innovators formulate new ideas by making connections between observations, experiences, facts, history and feelings that on the surface do not seem related—but are—to uncover fresh, brilliant insights? You can do the same.

My new book, RED THREAD THINKING: Weaving Together Connections for Brilliant Ideas and Profitable Innovation reveals how to activate your own knowledge and resources – what you already have at your fingertips – to make connections for big insights and smart, innovative ideas.  Here are just a few examples from this simple, common-sense approach that is as almost easy as tying a red string around your finger:

Look for new ideas within those that already exist.  Most “original” ideas aren’t completely original.  For example, the Gutenberg Press, which forever changed the world of communication, was based on ancient Chinese moveable type, the wine press from the vintners in Rhineland and Gutenberg’s own metallurgy experience.  Old ideas put together in a new way to change the world.
Ask unexpected questions.  How you frame a question is often the biggest path to new ideas.  Jay Walker, the creator of Priceline.com, could have created another aggregator traveler site that offers the best prices and schedules.  Instead he turned the tables.  He asked hotels and airlines what they might accept.  Consumers are now in a position to set prices, and as a result he opened a whole new way of doing business.
Look what can play into people’s existing behavior.  Many innovators make the mistake of thinking a new product must change people’s behavior. That’s hard to do.  It is much easier to look at their habits and just create a new fit. Returning from a family vacation and lugging baggage around the airport, Bernard Sadow saw a customs agent effortlessly roll a heavy machine with the help of a skid with wheels.  A little jerry rigging and the first wheeled luggage was born.
Sleep on it.  Sleep not only provides rest and restoration but it is essential to our ability to create and innovate.  Research shows that your brain is very active when you sleep and information transfers from one part of the brain to another, so that new associations and connections can be made more freely without being from some sort of experience in your life.
Think that you are a genius.  Attitude and belief in your own abilities makes you more curious and open-minded and more willing to take professional and intellectual risks.  The more you believe you can stretch yourself, the more you will think of your capacity to be smarter and you may just be so.

Red Thread Thinking is a process you can use to develop ideas from scratch and innovate in any situation – from coming up with new business ideas to coming up with ways to solve a sticky situation in the office.  It helps you achieve and succeed even in a weak economy.  With practice, you can become as naturally good at developing successful ideas as many well-known innovators.  Believe you can do it and you will.