Nooks and crannies are important to both English muffins and innovation.

I haven’t been able to get a picture of a lightly toasted Thomas’ English muffin with butter and strawberry preserves oozing into those marvelous nooks and crannies out of my head.  Maybe it’s because I’m resisting the temptation while on one of my frequent short-lived diet and exercise delusions.  More likely it’s because of a story that caught my eye last week about an executive who left the company (Bimbo Bakeries, I’m not kidding) that makes Thomas’ English Muffins to join the arch enemy, Hostess Brands.  It seems that Bimbo is suing to prevent the executive from joining Hostess because they suspect he has absconded with and will divulge the secret of how to make English muffins with perfect nooks and crannies.

You heard right.  The row is about protecting the trade secret for creating nooks and crannies in an English muffin.  Bimbo claims there are only seven people who possess the trade secret and of course the executive leaving to make Twinkies is one of them.  I find it hard to believe that only seven people have the know-how necessary to create great nooks and crannies. It sounds more like a marketing ploy. But what do I know.  I thought it was just using a fork to split the muffin!  Think about it.  Samuel Bath Thomas left England headed for America in 1874 with a recipe for his muffin baked on hot griddles.  Surely in over 135 years more than seven people have accumulated the know-how for nooks and crannies. And how are we to know if Samuel Thomas didn’t borrow the formula before heading for fame and fortune in America. Not to accuse Samuel Thomas of pilfering the recipe and starting an English muffin revolution but it does sound eerily similar to Samuel Slater escaping England with the trade secrets for the textile mill, which of course started the U.S. Industrial Revolution! Read more

Innovators leap across learning curves exploring new ways to deliver value the way Tarzan swung from vine to vine across the jungle.  Innovators thrive on the steepest part of the learning curve where the changing rate of learning is the greatest.  Watch how innovators manage their careers and lives. They always put themselves on a steep learning curve.  I know I always have.  Staying on a steep learning curve is the most important decision criterion for any career decision an innovator makes. Along the way innovators make many career moves none of which are primarily about titles, offices, number of direct reports, or money.  Innovators believe those things are more likely to happen if they keep themselves on steep learning curves. Every choice to take a new tack or direction is about the next learning curve. Innovators are self aware enough to know they do their best work while learning at a rapid rate and are bored to tears when they aren’t.  Steep learning curves matter most.

I have known many people who sacrificed learning curves for money and other extrinsic rewards and in the long run most ended up unhappy. In my experience innovators who follow their passions and are in it for the learning always end up happier and making more money anyway. Read more

I spent an amazing weekend in NYC immersed with 50 warm, passionate, talented, and crazy designers from around the world.  It was a think and do tank brought to a constant boil by the high heat of a Bunsen Burner applied literally by the 100 plus degree heat outside.  This was the fifth annual convening of Overlap, a self-organizing group of designers sprinkled with a few innovation junkies like me who like to hang around designers in the hope that some of their coolness will rub off.  Overlap is an intense peer-to-peer connection experience limited to 50 invitees per year. I had been asked to attend previous Overlap events but this was the first I was able to swing it.  I am very glad I did.  It stretched my thinking, strengthened some existing connections, and enabled many refreshing new ones.

Each year volunteers from the group agree to plan and host the next Overlap in a different city.  Kudos to this year’s organizers, Marcel Botha with Mutopo, a cool social production colaboratorie, and Debera Johnson from the Pratt Institute of Design. Urban retreats are a logistical nightmare, Marcel and Debera, pulled it off with grace and competence. Well done. Our working sessions were held at Pratt providing great space and a welcoming design vibe to enable the magic.  A wonderful mix of Overlap veterans and rookies took it from there.  The theme for Overlap 2010 was Scalable Actions.  How do we get our passionate ideas off of the white-board and in to the world where they can solve real problems and provide value to real people.  I think a lot about scale and have been riffing about innovation @ scale for many years.  The chance to immerse myself among so many brilliant design thinkers to ruminate about scale and how to advance our scalable ideas was most welcome. Read more

Being an innovator is both a blessing and a curse.  Innovators are constantly seeking to improve things by finding a better way.  A questing personality is a blessing providing innovators with a source of personal pride, accomplishment, and exhilaration.  At the same time an innovator’s job is never done.  There is always a better way.  A sense of perpetual incompleteness and never being satisfied torments most innovators I know.  I think this blessing and curse dichotomy is the secret sauce that makes innovators tick.  It motivates innovators to take personal risks, collaborate with unusual suspects to find a missing piece, and jump through incredible hoops seeking a better way.   Innovators wouldn’t have it any other way.

There is always a better way.  It doesn’t matter how innocuous or small a thing from everyday life it is.  You can always tell an innovator because they fixate on addressing small things with the same child-like enthusiasm they readily deploy to large complex societal problems. It’s the little things that often get innovators the most riled up.  I learned this lesson the hard way and share one of many personal examples.  After a long career as a road warrior strategy consultant I found myself at home trying to figure out what I was going to do next in my career. One morning I came downstairs and opened the cupboard that housed breakfast cereal for our three children and found it filled with twelve half-opened cereal boxes. You know the one I am talking about.  Tell me you can’t relate to this important dilemma. I fell into the trap and loudly proclaimed, isn’t there a better way to organize this cereal.  The response was immediate and resounding, thanks for the input, now go find something else to do, preferably out of the house!  I know my wife is groaning reading this thinking, no, not the cereal box story again.  Can’t you come up with a new story for heaven’s sake?  P.S. regarding the cereal box story, the children and the cereal boxes have left home and I miss them both terribly.   Innovators can’t help themselves, no matter how small the challenge, there is always a better way and they are driven to find it. Read more

A friend asked me this week, what is the single most important thing holding our economy back?  Without hesitation I said our psychology is bad and negativism is getting in the way.  We have allowed cynicism to slow progress, growth, and innovation.  I am as cynical as anyone.  Here in New England we are born with a well-developed cynical streak.  In my home state of Rhode Island we have taken the art of cynicism to entire new heights.  I am convinced we won’t climb out of this economic mess until we become more confident in our selves, our communities, and our opportunities.  Psychology matters.  A strong innovation economy creating higher wage jobs result from the decisions made every day by organization leaders and entrepreneurs.  It is the sum total of these decisions on the margin to hire one additional employee or to invest one additional dollar which determine the trajectory of our economy.  While many factors influence these choices in the end it comes down to psychology or confidence.  We must find a way to move beyond our cynicism.

The imperative is to unleash the animal spirits.  John Maynard Keynes had it right in his book, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, when he described animal spirits as the emotion which influences human behavior measured in terms of consumer confidence.  Keynes got the math right. Positive activities depend on spontaneous optimism rather than mathematical expectations. Our decisions to do something positive can only be taken as the result of animal spirits, a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction, and not as the outcome of a weighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative probabilities.  Amen. Read more

I tried.  I really did try to take a break from all the design and innovation buzz while on vacation last week in Spain.  It didn’t work. Throughout an incredible ten-day sojourn across northern Spain design and innovation reminders were everywhere.  It wasn’t premeditated.  I am sure the lens through which I view the world has a lot to do with it but I also credit Spain, which has a clear case of the design and innovation bug.  Then again maybe my perspective was colored by all of the great Rioja wine.  Here are the design highlights from this innovation junkie’s summer vacation.

We started our Iberian adventure in the great city of Barcelona.  On our first day we set out to see Casa Battlo and La Sagrada Familia designed by Spanish architect Antoni Gaudi. Both were on our must do list and unanimous recommendations from many Twitter friends who had been to Barcelona. Goodbye jet lag.  Wow.  I wasn’t familiar with Gaudi before our trip but will never forget his work after seeing it.  Gaudi was ahead of his time.  He was more modern than the Modernist Art Nouveau period in the late 19th early 20th century he lived and designed in. Throughout Gaudi’s life, he studied nature’s angles and curves and incorporated them into his designs.  His works are iconic and seem to flow directly from nature. Gaudi said, “The great book, always open and which we should make an effort to read, is that of nature”.  Amen. Read more

I have to admit when I was growing up and when we raised our children I thought weird was out.  Weird was isolated, ostracized, dismissed, and definitely not cool. Turns out I was wrong. Weird is in.  Weird is unique, refreshing, remarkable, and definitely cool.  It just took me a while to figure it out.  The evidence is all around us.  Two personal reminders of how weird can be an advantage are a recent trip to Austin, Texas and reading Delivering Happiness by Zappos CEO, Tony Hsieh.

I was asked to give a talk on business model innovation to a group of association leaders in Austin, Texas.  It was my first trip to Austin but the city’s reputation for embracing weird preceded my visit.  I love the city mantra Keep Austin Weird.  How many cities would have the guts to rally around such a weird positioning?  I think it is brilliant.  It is differentiated and sends a clear message to both residents and visitors that Austin is an edgy and interesting place where creativity is central and you just might learn something new.  It makes me want to live and invest there. The night I arrived the positioning was realized immediately as I joined an eclectic crowd forming on the Congress Street Bridge to watch North America’s largest urban bat colony emerge from under the bridge. You don’t experience that every day.  It was delightfully weird and the gathered crowd was a great manifestation of Austin’s community aspiration for a collaborative fission of coordinated individualism. Read more

In my latest Mass High Tech column I assert that making customer experience central, not technology, is the key to any innovation process.

The imperative of our time is to unleash the power of innovation to solve our big social challenges, including health care, education and energy. I think a lot about how to simplify the innovation narrative, make it more inclusive and become more experimental. Unleashing the power of innovation is about making customer experience central, focusing on outputs and looking up from our silos.

For starters we need a shared definition for innovation. Our rhetoric is all over the place and innovation has become a buzzword. Everything is an innovation and everyone is an innovator. When that happens, nothing and no one is. We conflate invention with innovation. They are not the same. A simple definition: Innovation is a better way to deliver value. It is not innovation until value is delivered one customer at a time. Often we don’t have to invent anything new to deliver value or solve a problem. We have to get better at reconfiguring and combining existing capabilities to deliver value. It is not technology that gets in the way of innovation, it is stubborn humans and organizations that resist change.

I am amazed at the number of innovation discussions where the voice of the end user is missing. Customer experience must be at the heart of any innovation and design process. Solutions are not about institutions, they are about patients, students, citizens and customers.

Continue reading Focus on the Customer Experience, Not the Technology in Mass High Tech

I’m not much of a car guy but when Ford announced it was dumping its Mercury line I got a little nostalgic.  I wasn’t born when “Rebel Without a Cause” was released in 1955 but remember seeing the movie as a kid and being in awe of James Dean.  Who can’t relate to the lonely rebellious outsider, with his slicked back hair and leather jacket, trying to fit in? No one remembers the name of the character Dean played (Jim Stark).  After a tragic death James Dean became the character in our minds for eternity. Don’t get me started on Natalie Wood. The thing everyone remembers and the real icon from the classic movie is the cool Mercury James Dean drove.  It was a 1949 six-passenger coupe, fitted with a V-8 and an attitude to match Dean’s character.  The Merc was coolness personified.

Don’t you wonder how the Merc became so cool coming from Ford where Henry’s motto was, any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black.  The Model T was the iconic product of a new industrial era. Henry Ford gave us the assembly line and mass production.  He didn’t give us cool.  For that you have to look to his only son Edsel, who had a better idea.   I know we associate the name Edsel with failure but that is because of a disastrous Ford model that was introduced in 1958 well after Edsel had died in 1943.  Edsel Ford was not a failure. Read more

It’s rare that a book so squares with your world-view that you think the authors have taken up residence in your head.  Henceforth The Power of Pull shall be known as my new playbook. The alignment is uncanny. It is a must read for all innovation junkies and anyone who is trying to sort out the possibilities of the 21^st century.  Many have tried to help us understand and navigate the transition from an industrial to a knowledge economy.  Few get below the buzzwords.  The Power of Pull not only captures the essence of the transformation under way it provides an actionable framework for individuals, institutions, and social systems.  It is a call to action reminding us of the opportunity and responsibility to remake our world in a way that deeply honors the potential of those around us.

I expected the book to be great. Just look at two of its authors.  John Seely Brown (JSB) and John Hagel are on my short innovation hero list.  JSB (How cool is it to be known by your initials?) was the Director of Xerox PARC with a front row seat in Silicon Valley before it became a household name in innovation circles.  JSB was one of the first people to encourage me when I was launching the Business Innovation Factory (BIF).  We both gave presentations at a conference in 2004 at Brown University.  After my talk, Innovation @ Scale; The Imperative to Think Big, Start Small, Scale Fast, JSB told me the idea for BIF to create a real world laboratory to enable R&D for new business models and systems was compelling. He asked how we would deliver on the proposition and we haven’t looked back since. Read more