Innoversity Blog

Open innovation - learning from the best!

Last week I had the pleasure of participating in an innovation session facilitated by IDEO, one of the most admired (especially by me) design and innovation companies in the world. I knew quite a lot about IDEO before this session, through books, journals and the media in general. Just as I had the pleasure of featuring Paul Bennett from IDEO at the INNOVATING WITH DIVERSITY conference last year.

But I had never seen IDEO in action, so of course this was an opportunity I had been looking forward to attend, with great anticipation. And I was not to be disappointed!

I was invited to the workshop by Ron Volpe, Director of Global Supply Chain Innovation at Kraft Food, so that I could observe in the workshop, and make use of these observations in my  ph.d. work. I met Ron last year at INNOVATING WITH DIVERSITY in Copenhagen, and even had the pleasure of organizing an event at Copenhagen Business School where Ron presented his Kraft Food approach to supply chain innovation, a truly great case in February.

The innovation session at IDEO was organized by Ron Volpe together with Target, in order to explore how Kraft and Target might find new ways to work together and improve their supply chain collaboration; through the identification and development of collaborative strategies and initiatives to engage in an open innovation process between Kraft Food and Target. The 35 people - most of them executives - from Kraft and Target had 2 days to do so. And boy, they truly did!

I can of course not share with you the results of the innovation session, but what I can share is some of the fascinating analogous observations we were sent out to do on the first day of the workshop. After having identified the primary opportunities for innovation at the intersection between Kraft and Target, we  were split up into smaller teams, who were each sent off to different places and sights around the Bay Area, to see what we could learn through analogous observations of people and organisations facing different, yet similar, supply chain challenges.

My group went off to a small private zoo in San Jose, where we met the woman in charge of all purchases of food and medicine supplies for the zoo animals, to learn first hand how she dealt with the logistics around that. We spent two hours at the zoo, learning everything from the use of dietary cards for each animal, to looking at storage facilities, to the preparation of food, to the shopping at the local Vietnamese market for vegetables and greens, and to the ordering or supplies and medication. It really was a fascinating peak into a totally different world, but the surprising thing was how much we could actually could benefit directly from the observations and insights in our own process, and how the learnings could be used and applied in the remainder of the workshop.

The other groups went to totally different places, one went to a Levis store in San Francisco, to learn from their approach to customization, where they were each to buy their own pair of jeans to experience the customization themselves. Another group visited Stanford Blood Bank, to learn from how they deal with freshness. Another group went to visit Sephora, for the ultimate shopping experience. Yet another group went to visit and interview a housewife about how she manages to store food worth 9 months of supply for her entire family. And many more interesting experiences. So as you can probably imagine, hearing about - and seeing - what each group brought home in terms of learnings and insights from their observation, was quite an interesting mental journey.

But so was the rest of the two days...... am still not through my 32 pages of observation notes from workshop yet ;-D

Serial Innovation (Sopranos II)

I already made one post about serial innovation, but thought that I wanted to develop that trail of thought a little further, with a look into the processes employed by the Sopranos crew, and how they benefit from the differences in the group in their serial innovation.

have been watching a few of the behind the scenes featurettes, as well as looking into interviews with both the executive producer David Chase, as well as audio commentaries by both producers, directors and screenwriters, in order to better understand the process they go though in the development of each of the Sopranos episodes. And it actually is quite an interesting picture emerging from these leisure-time studies of mine (some would call it procastrination, but since I do it for the blog, is most certainly is not ;.D)-

In the development of each of the episodes, the overall story-line, it seems that the team of writers, producers and directors meet on a regular basis, where they use collective ‘sit-downs’ (as Tony Soprano would call them), where the together will discuss and develop on the stories and episodes, and what they want to happen to whom, as a group.

After this initial brainstorming, they will decide who of the writers should then continue working on the storyboard, and then one of the staff writers will go off and write up a first draft of the episode and then come back and present it to the team. Based on what the team then decides, changes will then be made by the whole team, and sometimes another writer will be asked to re-do it or alter the whole episode script.

Once the script then has been approved, it will be given to a director. The directors of the show cannot pick and choose the episodes they would like to direct, but are given an episode based on whom the group finds to be the best director of that particular episode, and then they take over from there.

Often the director is someone from the outside, not part of the staff, who will then be working with the cast in creating each episode. Some of the directors have directed more than one episode, but many of them are newcomers. I have not yet been able to find out very much about how this use of director-as-newcomer is perceived by the cast. I have heard several of the directors mention that it feels quite strange to be ‘in charge’ at the set, whilst at the same time being the newcomer. But it most certainly provides for a continuous addition of new perspectives, and the director has to build on the talent working with him, he/she will never get away with a “my way only-approach”.

I would however like to find out what the cast thinks of the fact that they are continually confronted with a new director. They will usually spend between 8-12 days shooting each episode, and with each season consisting of app. 10 episodes, they are likely to be instructed by a new director ever other week or so.

Imagine working on an innovation project where the project manager is replaced every two weeks?

Managing serial innovation....

Over the last couple of weeks I have become increasingly fascinated with the hugely popular and most talked-about TV series “Sopranos”. The mobster series features the life of depressive mafia boss Tony Soprano and the life of his two families. Apparently, no American show on cable has ever been more successful with both critics and fans - and with good reason. I love it!

Watching The Sopranos on DVD is a great evening get-away from my writing, reading, thinking and analysis work done during daytime at Stanford. But even while watching Sopranos, innovation (the focus of my Ph.D.) never completely leaves my mind. And so I started wondering how on earth the Sopranos and other successful TV series manage to keep innovating - to capture their audience show after show, year after year?

How do the successful TV series crew and cast manage this? How do they manage what one might appropriately call ‘serial innovation?’

I realize that I do not have the answer to this question, but yet I started wondering - and began looking at the team behind the success of Sopranos - the cast, the crew - and I was soon to discover one interesting thing; namely that the managerial team (producer and co-producers, screenwriter and director) is NEVER the same from one episode to the next. NEVER! Is that not interesting?

For every episode of the Sopranos, either a new director or a new screenwriter will be added to the managerial team and someone else will exit; only the chief producer (Sopranos creator David Chase) has been constant over the six year production period. Everyone else is in and out - constantly. To illustrate this ever changing managerial team, I have made a list of the writers and directors for each of the 13 episodes of the first season, sourced from Wikipedia (click image to enlarge).

                                                                                                                                                              Could one of the explaining factors behind the ‘art of serial innovation’ be this constant constant mix and re-mix (many of the names appear several times) of the managerial team?

It does most certainly make sense in that it would provide for the continuous re-creation and re-negotiation of the set, the series itself, the story-lines, the cast etc. Different people constantly not only ‘manage’ the story, the crew, the cast and the series, but also prevent ‘the way things are done around here’ from being introduced to the set.

Such managerial flux forces the crew to continuously negotiate and re-negotiate their individual part, both with the newcomers, and with the existing cast and crew - which maintains a sort of permeable boundary around the ‘innovation group’, preventing them from becoming too settled in their roles too quickly, one of the primary barriers to successful innovation.

Imagine if organizational innovation was managed in the same way? Imagine if you brought in a new ‘screenwriter’ (content manager) for every innovation project? Or a new director (process manager) for every new episode (innovation project)?

This was just one thing we could learn from the production and innovation of successful TV series, but I know that there are many many more and I already look forward to exploring them further ..... so if this has you interest, please stay tuned for another episode of the innoversity  blog ;-D