Confusing Connection with Conversation

We all drink at the fire hose of connectivity yet thirst still for substantive conversation, Sherry Turkle, Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT, observed recently in the New York Times (4-22-12). We have sacrificed meaningful conversation and relationship skills for “mere connection” and transactional “friendships.” It seems Facebook, texts, emails, tweets, crowd-sourcing and other social-media induced behaviors are really more media than social.

Turkle has devoted her career to examining and understanding the interactions of humans with technology and how they influence one another. It doesn’t take an advanced degree to know what she is talking about as most of us experience it every day. And social media’s impact on substantive innovating can be debilitating.

According to Turkle, in contrast to messaging, “face-to-face conversation unfolds slowly. It teaches patience. . .as we ramp up the volume and velocity of online connections, we start to expect faster answers. To get these, we ask one another simpler questions: we dumb down our communications, even on the most important matters,” diminishing our chances for reflection.

Personally, this happens in my own life, too. I used to daydream or reflect when a break came in the middle of a busy day. Now, sadly enough, when those moments appear I check my mobile for messages. 

Professionally, I see this happening more and more, too. Hardly an hour goes by when I am facilitating a workshop—an intense face-to-face conversation—that someone checks in on his or her mobile device and checks out of the conversation. He stops listening to those talking around him, even to himself. Social norms don’t enable us to create what Turkle calls “device-free” zones. Yet allowing electronic interruptions subtly erodes empathetic listening and understanding, both of which are essential to innovating efforts. Thanks to Paula Rosch, a veteran innovator and principal of The Paula Rosch Group, for bringing Professor Turkle to our attention.

We used to differentiate the terms “creativity” and “innovation.” Creativity meant coming up with new ideas while innovation meant bringing those ideas to market. Now innovation means creativity and it seems we are losing our “connectivity” and relationship with reality. Perhaps this tendency of words to morph their meaning is inevitable. Yes, creative skill and capability are certainly involved in innovating, but so too are knowledge, knowledge-creation, empathy and awareness of prior art. We should remember Peter Drucker’s observation that “the bright idea” is the least reliable source of innovation. 

Like Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs in psychology, we have thought much about the hierarchies of learning and creating in this information age. Perhaps we should also consider the hierarchy of communicating as well—the necessary third leg of the stool in our digitally connected age. 

The basic phenomenon of innovating is not creating ideas alone nor just discovering new knowledge, neither is it the combination of these two. Something else is needed—genuine communication through dialogue. We need to value and create spaces for innovators to play and eat together to socialize and converse face-to-face. While innovating requires a dynamic network of connections, it also requires patience to listen, wisdom to discern and trust to engage in conversations—the old-fashioned kind—where two or more people gather together at the same time and same place just to talk, and listen.         


This article was originally published in Innovating Perspectives in May 2012. For this and other back issues of our newsletter, please visit our website at innovationsthatwork.com or call (415) 387-1270. 

Break on Through to the Other Side

What is more appealing to us with “breakthroughs,” the “breaks” or the “throughs”?

Breakthrough innovations occur far less frequently in reality than recent literature may suggest.  However, the viral spread and persistence of this term speak of its appeal. A larger portion of the appeal, I suspect, comes more from the “breaking” than it does from the [follow] “through.”

Many of us like to think of ourselves as allies of change more than guardians of the status quo. The role of the prophet speaks to change agents more than that of priest or pastor. Discovering the new consumer insight, inventing a novel solution to a chronic technological challenge or designing an elegant new product, service or business method can be vastly more exciting than slugging it out in the trenches to persuade the CEO that this new, unproven breakthrough deserves financing.

“Breaking” the mold and demonstrating that we can march to the beat of a different drummer is exhilarating. However, “breaking” may be only part of the story. Remember Thomas Edison’s famous quip about invention: 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.

Leo Shapiro, market research sage from Chicago, suggests that many innovators may have too strong an identification with Cassandra. Cassandra is the Greek mythological character who is cursed with the tragic ability to see reality and speak the truth without anyone to believe her. Those of us who deal with the “new”—whether discovering it, inventing it or managing through its implications—understand the Cassandra effect all too well. New ideas, by definition, foster rejection. New insights of emerging behavior and attitudes invite skepticism, denial and misunderstanding.

A persistent challenge for those of us with a vocational predilection for innovation and change is to overcome the Cassandra effect—to both see the truth and persuade others whether in word, prototype or spreadsheet. The job of the innovator is not finished when the new insight about end-user behavior is discovered or the invention is conceived. It has only just begun. Follow-through is of equal, if not greater importance, to successful innovation.

Veteran innovators deal with the Cassandra syndrome in many different ways. However, three factors are common to many of them: the right motivation, paranoia and courage, and bridge building skills and patience.

The Right Motivation

Spotting the right motivations is one way to differentiate a true (productive) maverick from an iconoclast (otherwise known as a “pain in the rear”). Being interested more in effecting positive change than being recognized is a sign that your heart is in the right place. There are revolutionaries, and there are revolutionaries who prefer to remain anonymous, preserving their freedom to continue and be even more effective the next time.

The former chairman of Coca-Cola once said that one could accomplish a lot if he doesn’t care who deserves the credit. So what are we really trying to do: meet needs in a new, more efficient way or be recognized as different and more clever than our competitor?

Paranoia and Courage

Andy Grove, Intel’s former chairman, recently elevated paranoia to a leadership virtue.  For those companies that live in markets that are frequently disrupted by innovation, paranoia is especially valuable.  Knowing what your competitor doesn’t know but would like to know is one thing.  But discovering something new about the end-user before your rivals discover it can prove preemptive.  But only if you are willing to act on it. The “new” doesn’t stay that way for long. Sooner rather than later, one of your competitors will discover what you have learned. To paraphrase the economist of innovation, Joseph Schumpter, innovation is less the result of the intellect than it is an act of the will.  Those who are the first movers frequently see their actions not as courageous, but simply as the only course of action.

Bridge-Building Skills and Patience

Living in Marin County (just north of San Francisco), it is difficult to ignore our debt to the people who conceived and created the Golden Gate Bridge.  When the bridge was built, the character of Marin changed forever, as did San Francisco, though less dramatically. In much the same way, veteran innovators are able to redirect their discovery and invention skills toward building bridges between the new (less developed territory) and the established (the more developed city).

Practiced innovators know that the new will foster rejection and attract “corporate antibodies.”  But instead of complaining about it, they anticipate and even invite it. They know that trusted critics can be the best allies of the inventor.  In the spirit of “tough love,” these critics will point to what needs to be done next.

For those who have seen the Golden Gate with their own eyes, envisioning that piece of coastline without a bridge seems strange.  The old black and white photos taken before the bridge was built confirm how strange the space looks without it.  And yet, while the bridge is one of the most attractive and picturesque icons of San Francisco, the less visible transformations its presence enabled at both ends may be the more profound value of its contribution.

So too with “breakthroughs”—the breaks get all the attention while the more lasting value may be in the subsequent changes required of both the new and the old in following through on the new reality.

This article was originally published in Innovating Perspectives in April 2001. For this and other back issues of our newsletter, please visit our website at innovationsthatwork.com or call (415) 387-1270.    

Innovation and Auto-Immunity

Success breeds its own orthodoxy.  When an innovation defies the odds and not only survives but succeeds, it is perfectly natural to want to continue that success by perpetuating what is believed to have contributed to the success in the first place.  What those contributing factors were, however, may be more subject to multiple interpretations and perceptions than some might first admit.  This is where the next “orthodoxy” starts to sneak in.

We have been working with a company recently whose success has attracted many competitors on the outside.  Success has also required internal attention and effort to order, control and focus the innovation-born success on the inside, the need for which is not unrelated to the intensifying competition on the outside.  The dilemma facing this post-entrepreneurial stage company now is how to protect, defend and perpetuate its success while at the same time continuing to fulfill its vocation of providing innovative value to current and new consumers.  Sound familiar?

As whole companies or even product divisions seek to extend their success, they naturally develop “immune systems” designed to maintain the health of the organization.  Just as our physical health depends upon a robust immune system – a complex network of cells and molecules that normally work to defend the body and eliminate infections caused by bacteria, viruses and other invading microbes – business “fitness” depends to some degree on a corporate immune system.  These corporate “immune systems” can be comprised of a complex set of management attitudes (e.g., focus), decisions (e.g., resource allocations) and controls that serve to protect, defend and perpetuate the value proposition for customers and the resulting profits for the corporation.

However, when organizational fitness becomes more important than business fitness, orthodoxy can set in, creating conditions for the corporate “immune system” to attack the corporation’s own innovation efforts, mistaking these efforts as threats or “antigens.”  Just as immune cells can mistake our bodies’ own cells as invaders and attack them, internally developed or externally sponsored innovations can elicit “friendly fire,” in some very subtle ways.  In other words, well-intentioned and otherwise necessary corporate “immune systems” can sometimes unintentionally turn on the host and become what the medical profession refers to as “autoimmunity.”

“Corporate autoimmunity” frequently happens when the organization’s own need for order becomes more important than its purpose of providing (new) value to customers or consumers.  A classic example of an “autoimmune” response to an early stage innovation effort is when a large corporation seeking to innovate disqualifies an effort based upon size of market.  “We are only looking for billion dollar businesses,” failing to remember that the billion dollar business they are currently defending once started with relatively small and more humble beginnings.

Clayton Christensen points to four subtle, but deadly “autoimmune” responses to innovation in his new book The Innovator’s Solution.  Christensen says there are at least four reasons in established companies that cause managers to target innovations that are not aligned with the way that customers live their lives (page 86).  “The first two reasons – the fear of focus and the demand for crisp quantification – reside in companies’ resources allocation processes.  The third reason is that the structure of many retail channels is attribute [rather than customer] focused.  The fourth reason is that advertising economics influence companies to target products at customers rather than [their] circumstances.”

In other words, both internal (e.g., resource allocation) and external (e.g., comparisons to competition or conformity to the way retailers organize their aisles) orthodoxies that grow up around attempts to perpetuate an innovation’s success, frequently cause us to take our eye off the “ball” of opportunity – what Christensen describes as a “sharp focus on jobs that customers (or consumers) are trying to get done.”

Might this be the place to discover “heresy” with which to break out of the orthodoxy of success and start the next innovation in new value to customers?

This article was originally published in Innovating Perspectives in November 2003. For this and other back issues of our newsletter, please visit our website at innovationsthatwork.com or call (415) 387-1270.    

The Ups and Downs of Innovation

Chutes and Ladders is one of my five-year-old daughter’s favorite board games. It may provide a fitting parable for the “ups and downs” of innovation.

In the game, progressing “up” the board toward the finish is painstaking and plodding and peppered with an occasional boost from a ladder or two that catapults you up toward the finish. In contrast, the chutes “down” seem more swift and catastrophic than even the lucky jumps up the ladders. Chutes feel more punitive than ladders are rewarding.

When my daughter first started playing this game, she enjoyed the wins, but was ready to quit the game altogether after “experiencing” a chute. With a bit of coaxing, however, and enough experience from a few ladders and wins, she learned to accept the downs with the ups and kept playing. Now it is one of our favorite games.

Companies investing in innovation efforts can easily follow the experience of my daughter with Chutes and Ladders. Early progress can be exhilarating and empowering, at least until the experience of the first, then the second and then additional “chutes.” The more swift and traumatic the “fall,” the quicker the company is ready to “cut the losses” and bail on the game altogether.  It is not until a company experiences a few innovation wins – accomplished even with an “unfair” share of chutes – that a company can muster the patience to stay in the game.

What I hope my daughter is learning from Chutes and Ladders is that success builds slowly, and failures are often swift, but both are part of the game. It is a profound lesson that too few companies are quick to learn regarding innovation. High performance in the context of innovation efforts is arguably the exact opposite of high performance in ongoing operations. Faults and failures are to be eliminated in the latter; while in the former, they are occasions for accelerated learning so necessary for reducing the new idea or concept to practice.

This is the difference between innovation and a board game: learning from our failures enables innovation efforts to become less a roll of the dice or a spin of the wheel.

Richard Farson and Ralph Keyes in last month’s Harvard Business Review (August 2002) quote IBM’s Thomas Watson, Sr. as saying, “the fastest way to succeed is to double your failure rate.”  Farson and Keyes argue for what they call failure-tolerant leadership and infer fault-tolerant innovation process or framework. In the same Harvard Business Review issue, John Wolpert (who leads IBM’s Extreme Blue innovation incubator in Austin, Texas) proposes innovation intermediaries as a way to overcome the otherwise introspective and chronically ineffective innovation efforts of large companies.

What both articles are pointing toward is the very thing we are attempting to understand in our Innovation Focal Point Study) including cultivating – where and when appropriate – the intermingling of internal and external networks.  It is through the deliberate and active cross-pollination of these networks that effective innovation focal points turn a company’s experience with innovation efforts from a board game into a more reliable business process.

Some degree of fault tolerance built into your innovation process can eventually transform even the steepest “chute” into a long ladder, and ultimately into innovations that work.

This article was originally published in Innovating Perspectives in September 2002. For this and other back issues of our newsletter, please visit our website at innovationsthatwork.com or call (415) 387-1270.    

The Father of Invention

Necessity is the mother of invention. Few of us would deny the truth in this age-old adage. Many of us have even taken what was a descriptive truth and made it into a prescriptive suggestion for our innovation efforts. If you want to innovate, put yourself in necessity’s way so that you will be required to invent your way out.

Think of the heroic efforts at improvisation by the Apollo crew who with duct tape and their wits were able to create a makeshift solution that saved them. Extreme circumstances (i.e., necessity) call on us to be resourceful.  But where does this resourcefulness come from? If necessity is the mother of invention, then who is the father?

We recently heard Stuart Brown, M.D., founder of the National Institute for Play, talk on the subject of “play” at a conference sponsored by Stanford University’s School of Engineering and the design firm IDEO, where the focus was on “the intersection of play and innovation.” Both the conference and my subsequent conversations with Dr. Brown leave me with the suspicion that too many of our corporate innovation efforts are single parent efforts.  They are based upon necessity alone, real or perceived. Has an almost single-minded obsession with corporate performance unwittingly eroded that resourcefulness so essential to meet necessity with inventiveness?

Stuart Brown’s interdisciplinary studies of play suggest that while necessity may be the mother of invention, the father may be play.  Brown, who produced the PBS-series “The Promise of Play,” a National Geographic cover story on play, and consults with companies like Mattel, brings a fresh perspective on what is necessary for innovation. Is playfulness essential to innovation?  Does the notion of play have a PR problem in the world of work?  Is the absence of play what is ailing a lot of companies when it comes to their relative inability to innovate? We offer these questions and the following four-point hypothesis to initiate a dialog with you:

1.   Elongating the life span of a company (e.g., sustaining its ability to produce profits) requires the ability to respond to the unexpected – surprises that will sooner or later arise from its competitive environment.  Arie de Gues (The Living Company) and Peter Schwartz (The Art of the Long View) have written convincingly about this. 

2.   The ability to respond to the unexpected comes from experience gained in what can actually be called “play.”  Using the word play is appropriate because it names activities and efforts that have no direct bearing on immediate performance, as measured in the traditional ways.  Peter Senge, John Seeley Brown and others refer to this as the “learning organization” or “communities of practice.”  An example of successful ‘play’ that prepared a corporation with notable results was Royal Dutch Shell’s scenario planning that prepared them better than all competitors for the unexpected oil crisis in the early 1970s.

3.   As they mature, corporations become increasingly driven by performance, losing their ability to “play.”  This makes the “play” engaged in during its entrepreneurial and pre-entrepreneurial stages increasingly rare, and disables the company, at least in the sense to be entrepreneurial.  As a result, more mature companies slowly lose their ability to attend, act and adapt to the unexpected (whether the unexpected comes from market conditions or changes in technology or both), thus threatening their ability to sustain profitability in the long term.

4.   In order to correct this “play entropy,” some percentage of the corporation’s resources (time, money, experts) should be regularly devoted to what the company would perceive to be “play” (e.g., R&D, Invention and Design, Futures, Exploratory investigations, “free range” activities, etc.).

We would love to hear what you think of this hypothesis and encourage you to read what Stuart Brown, M.D., has to say about the value of play at work.

 

All in a Day’s Play

By Stuart L. Brown, M.D.

Many think of inventiveness as essentially a human capacity granted by our huge brains and special linguistic and imaginative capacities.  But let us also factor authentic play into this scenario.  Imagine feeling really safe, well rested, well fed and free from anti-play cultural restraints like chronic guilt or permanent preoccupation with responsibilities.  (When is the last time you could say you were in such a situation?)  What spontaneously happens when we are free is we seek out play and get ourselves into our own personal play states.

It is in a state of play that unexpected novel connections get established.  Somehow, nature has specially designed us as the premier lifelong and best of players in the whole animal kingdom.  We have a persistent need to play freely.  So playing is part of our strategy to survive in challenging and changing ecological circumstances.

Some futurists have said that we will need to be more inventive, creative and flexible to handle the tasks, flow and rhythm of life in this century and beyond.  A sure (and fun) way to develop those abilities is to play.  Play by yourself, play with children, play with your officemates and friends.  Encourage your children to go out and play.  If they play, their problem solving and adaptive abilities will be in better shape to handle their world and they will be more likely to choose healthy answers to situations they encounter.

Play teaches us how to manage and transform our negative emotions and experiences; it supercharges learning, and is the foundation for good mental and physical health.  The components of play – curiosity, discovery, novelty, risk-taking, trial and error, pretense, games, social bantering – are also the essential components of learning.

Yet somewhere between childhood and adulthood, most of us exchange play for work and forget to play with the abandon and joy of childhood.  Work is where we spend much of our time so that is why it is especially important for us to play during work.  Without some light moments our work suffers.  Play arouses curiosity, which leads to discovery and creativity.  It develops adaptability and flexibility, which are fundamental to positive, proactive behavior.  The ability to take on responsibility, find meaning in life, and perhaps discover our personal bliss requires a full measure of play.  Play makes work pleasurable instead of drudgery, and there is simply the sheer fun of it.

For a good and inventive life, prioritize getting yourself some safe haven times for play.  Better yet, learn to include it in all of your life tasks.  If beyond the byproduct of inventiveness, you would like to experience more openness to change, a renewed spirit of optimism, non-dogged perseverance, the capacity to enjoy and sustain intimacy, keeping your workplace fun, I urge you to find your own personal play partners and niches – and honor them.

Editor’s Note: Stuart Brown’s commitment to the subject of play stems from his background in psychiatry, long-term research into human and animal play, as well as his clinical research into the causes and prevention of violence. Brown believes play is hardwired into our genetic code and is a state of being which can be accessed and used by everyone.  Humans want to play because it is instinctive and fundamental to human existence.  It is one of the evolutionary mechanisms that has developed us to our current state; play is part of how we adapt and survive anywhere on earth. His book Play: How it shapes the brain, Opens the imagination and Invigorates the soul was published in 2009. 


This article was originally published in Innovating Perspectives in March 2005. For this and other back issues of our newsletter, please visit our website at innovationsthatwork.com or call (415) 387-1270.    

Dr. Stuart Brown’s book Play: How it shapes the brain, Opens the imagination and Invigorates the soul was published in 2009.

http://www.amazon.com/Play-Shapes-Brain-Imagination-Invigorates/dp/1583333789/ref=lp_B000AQ74GC_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1335885923&sr=1-1

You can contact the National Institute for Play at http://www.nifplay.org.

Hunting for "Bears" with a Maverick

By John Raley

Several years ago, I was talking with some people about what it was like to work with a Maverick.  The answer I received was in the form of a story.  At first I found the story to be, well, quite humorous.  However, the more I thought about the story, the more I realized just how replete and rich it was with insights about Mavericks, about the people who work with them, and about organizations that hope to have successful Mavericks in their midst.

The story says working for a maverick is like going bear hunting.  Your group, including a maverick named Charlie, arrives at the hunting cabin in the evening.  After unpacking, everyone turns in for a good night’s sleep.  The next morning you awake and discover that Charlie the maverick is gone.

A quick search confirms that Charlie is not in or around the cabin.  About that time you hear Charlie’s voice, coming from the woods, yelling “Open the door, open the door!”  Looking outside, you see Charlie running down the path toward the cabin with a bear in hot pursuit.  “Open the door, open the door,” Charlie continues to yell.

“Oh my God,” everyone gasps.  “We have to open the door so that Charlie can get into the safety of the cabin.  If he has to slow down to open the door, the bear will surely catch him just outside the door.”  So you open the door and yell at Charlie to run faster.

Just as Charlie gets to the door, with the bear nipping at his heels, Charlie quickly steps aside.  The bear unable to stop, hurls into the cabin.  Charlie quickly slams the door and then heads back up the trail yelling, “You take care of that one.  I’ll go get another!”

That is what it is like to work with a Maverick.

Everyone in the story had the same purpose – going bear hunting.  However, there were different expectations of how the bear hunting would proceed.  The metaphors in the story say a lot about mavericks, about working with mavericks, and about what organizations can expect from mavericks.

The Bear represents new ideas.  All organizations want new ideas to improve their products, their people, and their competitive advantage.  Management is always interested in bringing new ideas into the organization.

The Group represents the people working with a maverick.  These people need to stay on their toes because they never know exactly what the maverick is going to be bringing through the door, or exactly when this will occur.  People working with a maverick need a broad spectrum of skills and need to keep their skills sharp because the form the new idea has when it enters the organization may not be what would normally be expected.  And, perhaps most importantly, people working with a maverick need to be comfortable with surprises and capable of handling them.

Charlie represents the Maverick.  The maverick sees his or her job as one of going out into the wilderness and bringing new ideas back to the organization.  Once the maverick has brought the new idea back to the organization (i.e., the bear is in the cabin), he sees his part of the job as done and goes off in search of the next idea.

People in the organization, unless they understand mavericks, will feel that the maverick has left things undone, did not maintain ownership of the idea through to completion, and left a mess for them to clean up.

The Cabin represents the Organization.  An organization is typically designed and operated with the expectation that things will happen in a certain way.  However, a maverick within an organization will often have things happening in a quite different way.  As picture in the story, having a bear loose in the cabin runs the risk of tearing up the cabin a bit.  However, the benefit is that the maverick is off hunting again and more bears can be caught sooner rather than later.

The same can be said of organizations who hope to have successful mavericks in their midst.  The organization must be flexible enough to accommodate having things “torn up a bit” knowing that, in the long run, they will have a more rapid influx of useful new ideas.  However, key to that success is also having a group of people within the organization that can take raw ideas and transform them into things that are of value to the organization.

Going hunting for bears with a maverick can be an exciting and profitable path for innovation within an organization.  However, be prepared.  Make sure that you are ready for surprises, you have a team that can handle them, and you have a structure that can survive some turmoil!

This article was originally published in Innovating Perspectives in September 1999. For this and other back issues of our newsletter, please visit our website at innovationsthatwork.com or call (415) 387-1270.    

Editor's Note: The Maverick Way: Profiting from the Power of the Corporate Misfit was published as a book in 2000. If you would like a signed copy of the book by author Lanny Vincent, please call 415-387-1270 or you may purchase a copy at Amazon.com: 

Origins of the Innovation Practitioners Network

In 1997, Bill Wilson, retired Senior Vice President of Innovation Management at Kimberly-Clark Corporation, along with Lanny Vincent and Dick Cheverton, began a collaboration that lead to the publication of The Maverick Way: Profiting the Power of the Corporate Misfit. The book chronicled the practices and experiences of Wilson’s innovation network which was instrumental in successfully transforming Kimberly-Clark—over a period of two decades—from a forest products company to a consumer package goods company. Jim Collin’s work, From Good to Great, refers to Darwin Smith, a so-called Level 5 leader, who successfully led this transformation of Kimberly-Clark. Bill Wilson, and his experiences described in The Maverick Way, is the story behind the story.

As he was writing the book, Dick Cheverton suggested to Lanny Vincent, that it might be a good idea to bring some veteran practitioners of innovation management together to test out some of the emerging themes in the book. From 1998 to 2001, Vincent & Associates, Ltd. underwrote a gathering of between 15 and 35 veteran practitioners of innovation. These annual gatherings were called The Mavericks Roundtable—spirited and stimulating exchanges that left their own lasting impression on those who participated and contributed, so much so, that they kept meeting, even after the original motivation for the gatherings had been accomplished—the writing of The Maverick Way. These practitioners came from a variety of different companies. Some of the more recognizable names included Hewlett-Packard, Weyerhaeuser, Whirlpool, Pitney-Bowes, and Eastman Kodak. Other companies included The Learning Curve, Clif Bar, Hello Direct, Sealed Air Corporation, Molecular Devices and The Sperry Group, among others. Many of these companies continue to participate today in the Innovation Practitioners Network.

In 2003, participants in the previous Mavericks Roundtables decided to conduct an indepth, five-company study, examining how companies with established revenue stream balance the demands and needs of the operating culture with the demands and needs of innovation. The resulting report, entitled “Soft Systems for Hard Cores,” made a modest, but original contribution to the field of innovation management with the description of an implicit but necessary role—innovation midwives. The report was published, under the title “Innovation Midwives,” in the International Research Institute’s journal, Research-Technology Management, January 2005.

One of the findings of this five-company innovation study was a strong correlation between successful innovation efforts and the health of implicit, informal networks of innovation practitioners. The implication was obvious. If the relative health of a company’s implicit and informal network of innovation practitioners matters so much, doesn’t it make sense to spend a little time and effort—in a low-key, implicit fashion—cultivating the heath and development of that network?

In 2004, six subscribing companies answered that question with a resounding “yes.” And thus, the Innovation Practitioners Network was born. The network meets annually and focuses on the principles and practices of Research and Development-based innovating. 

The 2012 Innovation Practitioners Network conference is on Applying Systems Theory to Innovating Practice. For more information call (415) 387-1270 or email lanny@innovationsthatwork.com.

For a copy of the Innovation Midwives report or a free signed copy of The Maverick Way: Profiting the Power of the Corporate Misfit, call (415) 387-1270 or email jane@innovationsthatwork.com. You can also purchase the book at Amazon.com:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0966822617/qid=1124312749/sr=11/ref=sr_1_1/002-3185445-0548811?v=glance&s=books