Innoversity Blog

Learning for a small planet

It truly is a small world sometimes. This Friday I was browsing around in the local Wholefoods here in Palo Alto (CA), when I bumped into Etienne Wenger and his family - what a pleasant surprise!

Etiennes Book from 1998 Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity remains one of the most important books I have read, as it provides an extremely important understanding of the role of and none the least the importance of identity in organizational practice. And most importantly, it provides for a domain of knowledge to become the locus of identity contruction and negotiation, and thereby also a great framework for the study of mechanisms of homogenuity and diversity in organisations.

I met Etienne for the first time at a Community of Practice conference San Diego in 2000, and have met both him and his family again on several occasions, last time in Copenhagen, where we had a great couple of days discussing Communities of Practice, and browsing around Copenhagen!

But the biggest learning experience around all of this was definately the week I was fortunate enough to spend in Portugal in the summer of 2002, where 20 community of practice affacinados - including Etienne - from all of the world, gathered in Setubal, Portugal. We spend five intense day in a circle, talking about learning, meaning, and identity in Communities of Practice. A truly amazing and very intense experience, and I learned so much in those five days....

Needless to say therefore, the Etienne and his work has had an incredible influence on my research, and I really look forward to his next visit in Denmark, where I am hoping that I can pick his brains a bit, and discuss my research with him once again!

But, bumping into him at Wholefoods, was truly a coincidence, they were heading back north (the live app. 3 hours away from here), so what are the chances of that? And the truly great thing about this was, that Etienne told me that his research project "Learning for a small planet" has now been granted the official non-profit status, which is an important first step in this truly amazing and very ambitius research project.

THE LEARNING FOR A SMALL PLANET RESEARCH PROJECT
Quoting from the project description: "Learning for a small planet is a unique project to develop new learning models for the 21st century. Many of the challenges we face today can be understood as learning challenges: economic development, the creation of a world culture that is both global and diverse, the environment, health, regional conflicts—to name a few. Increasing our learning capability is therefore an urgent imperative. But in order to do so, we need new models about how to proceed and new visions of what is possible"

Learn more at Etiennes website

Researching innovation journalism

Turo Uskali is another scholar here at Stanford who is doing some truly interesting research on innovation, and I therefore decided to do a mini-interview with Turo to ask him to share his innovation research in the making:

Tell me about your research project?
My current research project, which has just started, focus on innovation journalism. This work can be divided at least into two different themes or sections.

1) History of innovation journalism in comparative perspective. The objective here is to draw from existing, lively work on evolution of innovation journalism (business, technology, science journalism) in many parts of North America and Europe to identify relevant insights about theinterface of business, economy, technology, science and media.

2) Journalism as organized work.  The social organization of journalism as work and occupation, relevant to how issues get ‘covered’  The objective here is to focus on the issues how journalism work (and careers) are embedded in complex organizations and other career paths, and how this affects journalistic coverage of innovation processes and ecosystems.

What are the primary findings?
It is too early to tell about the primary findings, but I hope that afterwards it is possible to understand better the evolution of innovation journalism, and also define what is good innovation journalism.

Where can I find more information about your research?
You can find more information about innovation journalism from our web site: www.innovationjournalism.org.

Presenting my research

Innovation Center Denmark in Silicon Valley has invited me to talk about my research project while I am here at Stanford, and I look very much forward to doing so on September 7th.

I will be presenting some of my preliminary findings, and if you are anywhere near Palo Alto or Silicon Valley, please join us for this event, which is also the very first networking event by the Innovation Center. See invitation by clicking at image below.
 
You sign up by via email  - and if you want to learn more about  Innovation Center Denmark - Silicon Valley, please have a look at their website. Hope to see you there!

Researching open source innovation

Sladjana Vujovic is a visiting scholar here at Scancor / Stanford University, and because I find her research into open innovation to be both interesting and none the least important, I asked her for a mini-interview about her research.

Course why is it that we only learn about interesting research projects when they are all over and done with?  In the future I will therefore keep you informed about interesting research in the making  that I come across on my own innovation research journey.... And I am proud to hereby present my first innovation research in the making interview with Sladjana Vujovic:

Tell me about your research project?
My PhD thesis is about user-driven product development and innovation. The case I am studying is an Open Source Software (OSS) project. The purpose of my study is to offer insight into Open Source phenomenon through enhanced understanding of Open Source cooperation and product development seen from an organizational perspective – and to provide a meaningful guide to action for managers based on this study.

What are the primary findings?
I am only at the beginning of the data analysis. Hence, I do not have any concrete results yet, but I have made some interesting observations so far. One of them is the issue of recruiting the right people. Since OSS projects are based on voluntary participation, the challenge consists in how to attract the right people for the teams and how to fill out different roles.

Another thing I find both relevant and interesting has to do with the role of computer-mediated communication. There are some indications that some forms of online communication (which are actually used a lot by OSS communities) may not be best suited for an effective cooperation, decision making, discussions, execution and coordination of tasks. Furthermore, the world of virtuality creates an environment from which it is easy to disappear, when needed.

This thus has consequences for a person’s feeling of commitment compared to a traditional work place, where face-to-face communication and physical contact are present. Those are only a few of my observations… but more on them when I finish the analysis. 

What are the potential implications of those findings?
Managers need to realize that embarking on the open innovation journey implies different strategic choices between different strategies, and that it will mean increasingly having to balance the need for secrecy with the need for openness, as well as reconsidering the role and potential of their competitors and customers, who, in an open-source innovation context, may prove to be important partners.

From a strategic point of view, the OS-based alternative points to a need for a redefinition of the business model to take account of the fact that the focus of value creation has two loci of interest. One is related to the product itself. However, the associated incentive here is not directly financial (as in the traditional business model) but is indirectly of financial value, in the form of education and training (for the developer) and a higher degree of customer satisfaction (inasmuch as there will be no features the user has not asked for). Moreover, the direct financial focus of such a different business model will have to move further down the value chain to embrace new supporting consultancy and/or support services.

Where can I find more information about your research?
You can find more information on the Århus Business School Website:  or by contacting me via email

Dangers of prototypical leaders

I am going through quite a lot of articles at the moment, and the difference between how I read articles now compared to how I did it in the beginning of my phd-project is significant. Because now I know what I am looking for, my data presents me with interesting patterns, and I look into theory for theory to aid my understanding and interpretation of those very patterns.

One of the articles I read today was different though, even if it was not exactly was I was looking for, the article had me reading it from beginning to finish, and their research will definitely be referenced in my dissertation, somehow. It was an article from Academy of Management Review by Hogg & Terry (2000) entitled: “Social Identity and Self-Categorization Processes in Organizational Contexts”. There were several interesting points to pull from that article, but one paragraph was particularly interesting, and this is what I thought that I would share with you: Their discussion of the social construction of leadership in groups:

From a social identity perspective, leadership is, according to Hogg & Terry from University of Queensland, a “structural feature of ingroups (i.e. leaders and followers), which is produced by the processes of self-categorization and prototype-based depersonalization. Therefore (...) being a prototypical group member may be at least as important for leadership as having characteristics that are widely believed to be associated with a particular type of leader” (Hogg & Terry, 2000:128).

What this means is, that leaders often become leaders exactly because they embody “the aspirations, attitudes, and behaviors of the group”(Hogg & Terry, 2000:128), and not necessarily because they possess leadership qualities and competences. This is as such not interesting per se, we see that everywhere, the socalled Peters Principle or Law, where people are promoted until they no longer excel in what they do. The interesting thing in this article is their description of how groups tend to form such leaders themselves, through dynamic processes of social identity construction in groups with a high degree of group cohesiveness.

The danger to innovation then is that cohesive organizations (which we see everywhere in or branded and teambuilded organisations) then, according to Hogg & Terry (2000:129) often end op producing leaders who are selected as leaders exactly because they reproduce the present and therefore are less likely to produce the future (and even less likely to produce innovation). Such organizations:

1. Produce leaders who are prototypical but do not possess task-appropriate leadership skills (and end up producing groupthink instead of good management)
2. Consolidate organizational prototypes that reflect dominant rather than minority cultural attributes, and thus, exclude non-prototypical others from gaining influence, and obtaining managerial roles, and therefore
3. Produce an environment that is conducive to the exercise, and perhaps abuse, of power by leaders.

However, as Hogg & Terry explain (2000:130): “This rigidly hierarchical leadership scenario is most likely to emerge when conditions encourage groups (and organisations) to be cohesive and homogeneous, with extremitixed and clearly delimited prototypes that are tightly consensual”.....

Hmmmmm, something to think about......

Outcome-driven innovation

I just spent most of my weekend reading Anthony Ulwick’s latest book What Customers Want (2005) in which he elaborates on his approach to user-driven, or as he calls it, outcome-driven innovation (which he claims is all about moving beyond customer-driven innovation. The book is a quick read and offers some easy-read tools and methodologies for working strategically with customer input in the innovation process.

I first learned of Ulwick and his approach to innovation in 2002, in the Harvard Business Review article: “Turn Customer Input into Innovation”, where he criticized the ways in which many companies failed in their attempts to capture valuable customer input, and how they made use of that input to direct innovation efforts... According to Ulwick, too many companies simply collect the wrong input from their customers, as he explains:

“Customers should not be trusted to come up with solutions; they aren't expert or informed enough for that part of the innovation process. That's what your R&D team is for. Rather, customers should be asked only for outcomes - that is, what they want a new product or service to do for them. Maybe they want to feel a closer bond to people when talking on the phone or to spend less time traveling to and from the grocery store. What form the solutions take should be up to you, and you alone (Ulwick, 2002:92)”

But this does not mean that one should not be listening to customers, it only means that the way in which customer input is collected, used and applied should be carefully structured, not around solutions, needs and benefits, but rather focus on the outcome customers want a given product or service to have, and none the least, to focus on the ‘jobs’ and ‘tasks’ that customers are actually seeking to achieve.

The book which came out last year is an elaboration of the 2002-article, which has been developed a bit further to also include the innovation process, which he describes in these steps:

1. Plan outcome--based customer interviews (requires field observation to understand product use)
2. Capture desired outcomes (Ulwick states that most products have between 50-150 outcome metrics)
3. Organize the outcomes
4. Rate outcomes for importance and satisfaction (using the opportunity algorithm described below)
5. Use the outcomes to jump-start innovation (this is where his message becomes a little toooooo simple...)

The opportunity algorithm basically captures the relationship between the importance customers attach to each of the identified outcomes, or as described by Ulwick:

“The formula [Importance - {Importance-Satisfaction) = Opportunity] yields highly accurate results. Companies ask their customers to quantify on a scale of one to ten the importance of each desired outcome and the degree to which it is currently satisfied. Those rankings are inserted into the formula, resulting in an overall opportunity score” (Ulwick, 2002: 96)

What then emerges is an overall score, identifying where the opportunities for innovation seem to be most interesting, namely the outcomes with the highest scores on importance and lowest scores of satisfaction. Other innovation opportunities exist in terms of cost-cutting, which becomes an evident path to pursue when certain outcomes score high on satisfaction and low on importance.

The way in which this is all presented by Ulwick is rather simplistic, which can be quite annoying at times during the reading, but none the less, he really offers some interesting insights regarding user-driven innovation, and in his book he describes the need for us to move beyond the customer-driven paradigm, which he describes in this way:

“Using the customer-driven approach, companies began to conduct customer interviews and act on the feedback they received. They performed ethnographic and anthropological research. They began to test product concepts with users. Indeed, over the past two decades qualitative and quantitative research methods have become corporate staples. (...) Customer-driven thinking is well entrenched and has become the mantra of the corporate world. But after twenty years of customer-driven thinking, U.S. companies still find that 50 to 90 percent of their product and service initiatives are failures, collectively costing them more than $100 billion each year” (Ulwick, 2005:xiv).

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

Researching innovation + diversity

It is nothing new that very little research has been done over the years, into the role of diversity in innovation - it has been my concern for several years, and was the major reason for me embarking on my current Ph.D. project, even though I really do not think of my self as a researcher. But several years as a consultant with Innoversity (my own company), where I was working with diversity as a way to leverage innovation in multinational organisations, only confirmed this.

And now as I am doing my analysis work for my Ph.D. I thought I should back this claim of mine with a little data, by looking at the number of research articles published over the last 20 years, which mention both the word diversity and the word innovation. This is still a work in progress, but if you take a closer look at the graph above, you will see that the total number of articles published since 1986 is only 112, whereas the total number of articles about innovation in the same period was as impressive as 6215 articles. The role of diversity therefore seems to attract very little attention by innovation scholars, and has been neglected by innovation scholars and researchers over the last two decades; albeit the graph indicates a small increase in the number of articles over the period in question.

Moreover, the articles published about innovation + diversity over the last 20 years were published in nothing less than 77 different academic journals, which is an unusually high amount of different journals from a range of highly different fields, disciplines and industries.

Furthermore, it was actually only 20 out of the 77 journals which had more than one article about innovation and diversity; the remainder of journals, e.g. 57 journals, featured only one single article about innovation and diversity. The highest number of articles about innovation and diversity published in one single journal was 6 (se table below), which was not in one of the innovation journals as one could expect, but in the European journal: ”Research Policy”.

With 77 different academic journals dealing with this topic, the issue does not seem to get very much attention in any particular journal or academic discipline. This seems to indicate two different sets of problems: first of all the lack of knowledge about the role of diversity in innovation, revealed by the very low number of articles published about the field, and secondly, it is relatively difficult for each of the innovation scholars in the field to build on each others research, because they represent highly different academic disciplines and industries, while at the same time allowing researchers to benefit from their own academic diversity, in furthering the overall research into the role of diversity in innovation.

It will be interesting to see which one of the two will prevail.....