Commentary by Ellen Domb

Business Innovation Conference- Day 2

The audience was immediately fascinated by the opening talk by Prof. Charles Cooney, director of the Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation at MIT. The Deshpande center is a unique institute that sponsors academic research on the process of innovation. Cooney surprised the audience with his claim that both the academic and venture capital communities are risk averse (in different ways) and that rather small grants in the right way at the right time can bridge the gap between them. None of the money goes to developing business plans—that comes much later in the innovation cycle. His “value chain” is easy to remember: “Idea®Invent®Innovate®Impact “ and his lessons learned list has a small number of critical risk reduction steps at each interface. Most interesting to the Business Innovation Conference audience were

1. The method of evaluating the proposals for potential market application, 2-3 years in advance of venture capital investment.
2. Replicating the model in multiple countries and universities, which is just starting now.

I was the chair of track 2 for the rest of the morning, so readers interested in track 1 should consult the conference website, www.businessinnovationconference.com. Kim Johnson, consultant from Minneapolis-St. Paul (and PMI, and PDMA, and Scanlon network and …) started track 2 with a great anecdotal talk about 3M’s GRIT—the Grass Roots Innovation Teams. Those not familiar with 3M were amazed by the “McKnight Principles” from 1948, which had a very “modern” tone regarding the innovation culture of the organization.

Langdon Morris from Innovationlabs presented a structure for creating an innovation culture. He used many visual metaphors and analogies to explain his model, which the audience found very helpful, and illustrated the theory with the Coca Cola innovation case study. The difference between the Status Quo Culture and the Innovation Culture are remarkable—no need for me to take notes, since Langdon generously offered the audience (and our friends) free downloads of his book “Permanent Innovation” and the conference paper, from www.permanentinnovation.com

Bill Burnett from W. Burnett LLC presented “Steps to become an innovative company” that had some points in common with Morris’ method and some significant differences. The story of Nummi (the joint GM/Toyota automobile assembly plant started in 1985) is relevant, since it demonstrated radical change with the no change in the worker population. Nummi had the highest rate of suggestions (product and process improvements) and the highest rate of line shut-down (to prevent quality problems from continuing) in part because of policy changes to remove fear from the system, and in part from creating an infrastructure so that the employee got positive feedback: suggestions were implemented, problems were fixed. A key strategy (illustrated with several stories) was removing vocabulary that has implications of Adult-Child (manager-worker, superior-subordinate) and replacing it with Adult-Adult vocabulary (colleague, teammate, team member).

This was a very full conference agenda—even lunch had a speaker. Tony Reyes, CEO of CartonCraft, gave a delightful, informal talk on how he acquired a company doing less than $5 million/year in business and grew it to triple that size in 5 years by creating a culture of daily innovation based trust and learning. Photo: Tony Reyes networking with the participants.

“Market factor co-evolution” is the theme of Tom Duening, director of the Entrepreneurial Program at Arizona State University. He took us back to basics, to Drucker’s statement that “the objective of all healthy enterprises is to strive constantly to create greater customer value.” Their curriculum includes “opportunity recognition”—the breakthrough was realizing that there a method for opportunity recognition, and it is teachable and learnable. He used the examples of Cirque du Soleil and Yellowtail Wine, from the Blue Ocean strategy book to illustrate the method of seeing opportunities.

I had the challenge of introducing TRIZ in one hour to the Business Innovation Conference attendees who had never heard of TRIZ—we told delegates who had knowledge of TRIZ to go to the other session. We should get a lot of new TRIZ Journal readers from this, and many people going back to their organizations to ask new questions.

Praveen Gupta had a very interactive session on Measuring Innovation. The audience challenged all the methods of measuring innovation and the need for making the measurements. He brought the whole range of views together by pointing out the relationship between outcomes and process measures.

Even the reception had a keynote speaker! Patrick Whitney, Director of the Institute of Design at IIT talked about the role of design in translating customer needs for services and products into concepts that can be developed, produced, and delivered.

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