While writing my previous post ‘Lead users, geeks, and freaks’ I started to realize that actually many innovations originate from what I defined as ‘lead users,’ people that solve a big problem for themselves. Here are a few:
- The Internet became big after HTML was invented by Tim Berners-Lee because he needed another way to present his research.
- The Camelbak was invented by a paramedic that found it too dangerous to reach for his drinking bottle while on his racing bike. He came up with the idea to sow an I.V. Bag into the back of his shirt.This evolved into a Camelbak.
- The sports bra was invented in 1970 by a Victoria Woodrow who just started jogging and was severely annoyed by here bouncing breasts.
- White-out liquid (Tipp-ex) was invented in the 1940’s by a secretary called Bette Nesmith Graham to fix her typing mistakes. She initially named the product “Mistake Out”
Of course there are other categories of innovation without the inventors having a problem. The most interesting being dreams and accidents. We would not have airplanes if nobody had dreamt of flying. If Sir Alexander Fleming had not accidentally left out one of the glass culture dishes in his lab, we would not have penicillin.
If you know of any interesting innovations from people solving their personal problem, feel free to add them in the comments section.
November 27th, 2009 by Jaap Linssen
Tags: Innovation, lead, lead users
A survey with 1400 CIO’s by Robert Half indicates that 54% of interviewed companies completely prohibit social media.
“Using social networking sites may divert employees’ attention away from more pressing priorities, so it’s understandable that some companies limit access,” said Dave Willmer, executive director of Robert Half Technology.
A few decades ago the same reasoning took place regarding phones. Normal employees were not trusted with a phone on their desk.
When I look around, I see that the companies that are consequently successful are open and interact with their environment. I bet that the average company allowing their employees to access social media is client focused and that the average company not allowing access has operational excellence as a greater priority than their clients.
October 9th, 2009 by Jaap Linssen
Tags: Innovation
The current financial crisis affects virtually every organisation to some extent and as a result less investments are being made. Actually, cost efficiency is a term that is mentioned a lot lately. Therefore, people question whether innovation will be high on the agenda. I dare to argue that it should be, otherwise these organisations will fall behind. This blog post is the second of two about innovation in a time of recession, and specifically focusses on the combination of innovation and cost efficiency. The first post was about innovation and strategic agility in times of recession.
Sales of innovative products in the Great Depression
In a blog post, written on the Innovate on Purpose blog, a comparison is made between the recent recession and the Great Depression. The writer quotes a report “Collateral Damage” released by the Boston Consulting Group. The report states that industries with highly innovative products withstood the Great Depression fairly well. An example is given in the form of the sales figures of refrigerators, considered an innovative product at the time, which grew by 30% from 1929 to 1933. You can grant this to the desire to be an early adopter or the fact that over time refrigerators save money by keeping food fresher, or a number of other attributes. But in the end, people were spending money on innovative products and services in truly bad economic times. To relate this with the recent recession, the winning combination would be to strive for innovative products and services that let consumers save money.
Cost saving idea challenges
Innovation is not only about new products and services, but also about new processes. A process innovation is the implementation of a new or significantly improved production or delivery method. First of all, idea generation focused on process innovation often generates ideas that cut costs. So the combination of innovation and cost efficiency can be brought together by idea challenges focussed on cost savings. In times when budgets are being cut back, this aspect of innovation can be very helpful. Secondly, when striving for a truly innovative environment it is very important that everybody in the organisation participates. This creates a situation where a small contribution by all, means a big difference at the bottom-line.
Involving all employees in a cost saving idea challenge therefore seems to create a double-win: an innovative organisation and ideas for cost savings.
August 3rd, 2009 by Jurjan Huisman
Tags: Innovation, Strategy
The current financial crisis is affecting virtually every organisation to some extent and as a result fewer investments are being made. Actually, cost efficiency is a term that we hear mentioned a lot lately. Therefore, people question whether innovation will be high on the agenda. I dare to argue that it should be, otherwise these organisations will fall behind. This blog post is the first of two about innovation in a time of recession, and specifically focusses on innovation and strategic agility.
Innovation and strategic agility
In a previous post on the Innovation Playground blog, the author states that the best investment you can make right now is to invest in the innovation capability of your organisation and reorganise to become an agile corporation. But what actually is strategic agility? On the website www.strategicagility.com the concept is defined as follows:
“The ability to continuously adjust and adapt strategic direction in core business, as a function of strategic ambitions and changing circumstances, and create not just new product and services, but also new business models and innovative ways to create value for a company.”
Strategic agility is already important in normal economic times, but even more so in difficult times. Because the environment changes quickly and organisations have to adjust to them. In times of high economic growth not much drive exists to change the organisation, but in difficult economic times one simply needs to change. Lower budgets make people more creative.
How to become more strategically agile?
According to the authors of the book Fast Strategy, three essential capabilities need to be in place to be strategically agile: strategic sensitivity (both the sharpness of perception and the intensity of awareness and attention), resource fluidity (the internal capability to reconfigure business systems and redeploy resources rapidly) and collective commitment (the ability of the top team to make bold decisions –fast, without being bogged in “win-lose” politics at the top). In the end, a lot of companies have overcapacity because of a shrinking production. Being agile involves resource fluidity: being able to put that overcapacity to use in a different way.
Act now!
This is the right time to use the overcapacity for innovation purposes. If you invest wisely to become more innovative and agile, your organisation will have a competitive advantage when the economy turns around.
July 28th, 2009 by Jurjan Huisman
Tags: Innovation, Out Of The Box, SIT, Workshop
The Canadian company Ecobee launched a thermostat that can be controlled trough the internet.
“The ecobee Smart Thermostat is a 7-day programmable thermostat designed to help you conserve energy, save money and reduce your environmental impact. The ecobee Smart Thermostat provides ease and flexibility in the management of your home environment and comfort.”
In itself the Ecobee isn’t a great example of ‘out off the box’ thinking, but is a nice SIT (Systematic Inventive Thinking) example. Specifically this is an example of the ‘dividing’ exercise where the functions of a product are split to see if they add value in that way. In this case the controls are taken of the thermostat and offered in a different way (the web). Another example of ‘dividing’ would be the remote control of televisions.
SIT is very powerful as it forces you to think in ways you are not used to leading to very creative ideas. The SIT workshops we run with our clients always lead to ideas that are pursued further. Give it a try!
May 20th, 2009 by Jaap Linssen
Tags: Innovation, Out Of The Box, SIT, Workshop
This week Cubetree launched. Cubetree is the next generation Social Platform for the enterprise. With our team of enterprise social media implementation experts we put it through a quick test. Cubetree is a very powerful platform that has most functionality you would want in an enterprise setting. If you want to get a feel for where this industry is heading, take a look. It really does all the social stuff!
Just to name a few things: sharing documents, sharing links, wiki’s, sharing photo’s, setting goals for yourself and others, etc, etc. Integration with Google Calender, Salesforce, Webex, Twitter, Tripit, Google Docs, Google Reader, etc etc. Yes, very impressive.
However, after an hour we stopped using Cubetree because it just generates too many updates. We tested with 3 people and were just completely overwhelmed by the updates. We imagined what would happen if 15 more colleagues would partake and shivered. For now we are going back to using Yammer for our internal communication, and wiki’s and Google Docs for collaboration. If Cubetree solves this issue, we’ll give it another go and potentially implement it at clients.
May 13th, 2009 by Jaap Linssen
Tags: Innovation, social platform
Our intern Jan Martijn Everts mentioned a piece of interesting research to me that I would like to share with you.
