Last night I watched a show on Dutch TV called Tegenlicht. The theme of the show was solar power. I was amazed and inspired that it is taking of so fast. The show is in Dutch, however for those that want to view it, you can click here.

In 1999 a law was passed in Germany called “Erneuerbare Energie Gesetz.” It garanteed that Solar electricity would be purchased for 55 Eurocent per Kilowatt hour, while it could be produced for 6 cents per kilowatt hour. The result is that it became worthwhile to invest in solar production, which many did. The Architect of this all, a man called Sheer, hopes that by 2030 100% of power is renewable. Other countries such as Spain are following the Germans and are preparing such a law.

The initial idea seems flawed. Paying such a premium doesn’t adhere to our capitalistic ideals. However, the result is that the technology advances a lot faster, greatly reducing costs. As the momentum increases, costs will go down to competitive levels. Further advantages are that this industry currently employs more people in Germany than does the automotive industry and the industry is growing 30% per year.

Will we be living in a world without a need for fossil fuel in 2030 and look back at one of the most radical innovations of the past centuries?

Earlier this week I was working with a senior manager from one of our clients to draw up a text that is meant to both illustrate his commitment to innovation and also call the company’s employees to action. In this text he used words as “killing ideas” and  “Innovation projects bleeding to death.”

The reason I’m writing a blog post on the subject is that this guy is not the only one to use such terms. It is ingrained in corporate culture.

We are convinced that using death as metaphor is not helpful (put lightly) when you are trying to activate your people to show more innovative behaviour. Read More

On September 8th Forrester released a paper describing why innovation management tools are slow to penetrate the market.

I will summarise their findings below:

1. Failing to keep endusers engaged. Projects start of with great enthusiasm but quickly the enthusiasm of the users fades. Forrester states that tools are getting more advanced in keeping users interested. We agree that enthusiasm easily fades, however the solution is not so much in the tool. Too often the tools are selected by ICT department that technically implement the tool but do not have enough eye or mandate for the organisational aspects of innovation management.
2. It’s hard to quantify the immediate benefits of Innovation Management tools in terms of ROI. According to Forrester the best way to deal with this is to rely on real cases, story telling and word of mouth.
3. “I cannot invest time or money in this right now.” This argument is heard because Innovation management is not yet well understood among mainstream enterprise buyers and the current financial markets are not favourable for investment decisions. We expected to see an effect of the current financial crisis. However, it seems that the awareness of the market is increasing. The bottom line is that we are seeing an increase in interest in these tools compared to previous years.
4. “We’ve tried Sharepoint, and it doesn’t work very well.” The fact that people have the idea that they can manage innovation through sharepoint indicates the lack of understanding of innovation. If becoming more innovative was just a matter of building some functions on top of Sharepoint, why are so few companies successful at innovating? Managing innovation is not easy and good tools to support innovation management are sophisticated.
5. “My innovation process doesn’t revolve around software tools.” Forrester agrees there are a healthy number of successfully innovating companies that do not rely on tools. They agree that best practices around culture and processes are important. However, innovative processes and cultures can be very well supported by tools. Forrester states that fundamentally, innovation success hinges on the triadic alignment of people, process, and technology.

Robert Tucker has written an interesting short article about the importance of having effective idea selection criteria. One point really struck me because we often hear from our clients that their problem is not getting ideas, but having too many ideas. Tucker recognizes this too and his opinion is that in many cases companies don’t have good criteria to select ideas and therefore get stuck in heaps of half-baked incremental ideas. He stresses that idea selection is key to keeping a healthy stream of ideas. He refers to Disney, Google, GE and Amazon to show how good idea selection processes are designed. Robert Tucker will be speaking at the Innovation Leaders Summit in London.

Yesterday we were at eDay in Rotterdam. eDay is a yearly conference organized by Emerce a leading Dutch Internet magazine. The main theme of the day was crowdsourcing.

The day was kicked off by Jeff Howe. He crowdsourced his way to Rotterdam! Howe wrote one of the leading books on crowdsourcing. If you’ve read his book, his presentation did not really bring news.

The second speaker I saw was Dan Lyons from Newsweek with a hilarious story about a blog he had “The secret Diary of Steve Jobs”. With over 1 million unique visitors a month, a great success. The interesting point from a crowdsourcing perspective was that it took Dan a long time to realize that it wasn’t just his talent that made the blog so successful but that for a large part it was due to the fact that readers were contributing in a fantastic way. It became a stage for very creative and talented people.

The next speaker I saw was Brian Kalma from Zappos (a very successful online shoe retailer in the US). They are said to be so successful because of their outstanding service. Because of this outstanding service the crowd does a large part of their advertizing. Brian talked about a lot of aspects that lead to their success. He had a number of examples of their service. One of which is the fact that when a customer is looking for a shoe they don’t stock, the customer service rep searches competitor sites and directs the customer there. They claim that the next time the customer will come to them first. Brian mentioned a lot internet activities that make them so successful. However, to me the most important aspect of their success is their culture. I would have liked to hear more about the way they created and foster it.

The next speaker I heard was Andre Convents from Procter & Gamble. P&G are
famous for their Connect & Develop program where their ambition is that 50% of new revenue comes from innovation with the outside world. Something that startled me was that if P&G want to grow their revenue (through innovation) by 4% annually, they need 100 million Dollars of new business every week. An important way of connecting to the outside world is to look for products that are successful in a specific geographical area. They can pick that up and make the product big because they have a world wide market reach. For P&G it’s a great win because they do not need to invest as much in product development and the initial consumer tests, which was done by the other company. For the company that initially marketed the product it’s a win because they profit from the distribution power of P&G. Finally, I jotted down this interesting statement: “Research is money transfered to knowledge. Innovation is knowledge transfered to money.”

I then moved on to a speach by Dave Blank from Twente University (The Netherlands). In one hour he told us what Nanotechnology can bring us in the future. I’m not even going to try and summarize it, but I was blown away and so was everyone else.

I saw Joris van Heukelom from Ilse media. He had a great story about “Henk” and “Pimmetje” that showed us the immense difference in the way two generations use the new media. Pimmetje being a connected modern young person and Henk being a marketeer in his forties.

The interesting aspect I picked up from Julie Meyer from Ariadne Capital was that start-ups are increasingly being seen as an alternative for market research.

Lawrence Lessig closed the day with a formidable presentation about the new creative class and the fact that the current/old copyright laws just do not apply to the way these kids behave. The point he makes is that every (nice) kid breaks the law in the way they use the internet. They don’t break the law because they are criminals, but because the laws no longer suffice. If you constantly break a non sufficient law, you lose respect for the entire system.