Uncover repeatable processes and timeless fundamentals that can be tailored to any situation with this inspiring guidebook that encourages individual and organizational innovation. With the challenges of cultural constraints and variable conditions, there is no exact blueprint to drive innovation. Even so, there are ways to make it more possible. Regardless of your situation, the basic "what" and "how" of innovation has not changed. Get advice from innovators in a variety of fields who provide the substance you need to build a solid innovation program. These practical messages deliver guidance to help you become a better innovator yourself and to create the team dynamics to boost organizational performance. Writers of innovation essays include Eric Garvin, Global Hawk manager at Northrop Grumman Corporation; Paul Byron Pattak, political and business strategist; Chris Haddock, head football coach at Centreville High School in Centreville, Virginia; and many more! Become a pragmatic visionary who not only sees where an organization needs to go but who knows how to inspire people to achieve goals. Get a foundation of solid skills to start Hitting the Innovation Jackpot.

Hitting the Innovation Jackpot

Practical Essays on InnovationBy Darren McKnight

iUniverse, Inc.

Copyright © 2011 Dr. Darren McKnight
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4620-7010-7

Contents

Foreword...............................................................................viiAcknowledgments........................................................................xiiiAbout the Front Cover..................................................................xivAbout Back Cover.......................................................................xvIntroduction...........................................................................xviiCommunications.........................................................................2Listen, Learn, and Write Things Down...................................................9Innovation Exemplar: Crossword Puzzle..................................................18In What Quadrant Do You Live?..........................................................23High Tech, High Touch..................................................................27Healthy Body = Creative Mind...........................................................33Think Outside the Box..................................................................39Cognitive Diversity....................................................................44Types of Innovation....................................................................48Incrementally Aggressive...............................................................54TRIZ...................................................................................61Innovation by Axiom....................................................................71Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs for the Twenty-First-Century Workforce.....................80East versus West.......................................................................84Reverse Innovation.....................................................................90Innovation Value Chain.................................................................94Bridgers, Implementers, and Visionaries................................................100Epilogue...............................................................................107Guest Innovation Essays................................................................111References.............................................................................145

Chapter One

Individuals

Communications

Most brilliant people have the ability to describe their insights and technical breakthroughs in a compelling fashion. However, truly productive people also have the commendable skill and rare inclination to see the value in listening to others in order to advance their own concepts even further.

"Great thinkers listen first."

—Michael Gelb

Listen to other people. Let the words sink in and digest them. If you are tempted to ask a question, then jot down a note so you do not forget the point that you are curious about. This intellectual restraint is a great technique that supports active listening. Take that extra step to avoid distractions that would prevent you from listening intently. In addition, writing down a question or some highlight you find useful is a sign of respect that helps to engender trust between you and the speaker.

Once the message has been absorbed, ask questions to test a hypothesis—not to impress people or belittle the speaker. A real listener does not ask a question that starts with "I was thinking ..." Instead say, "You mentioned earlier ... Could you comment on how you ...?" The questions should be about understanding the speaker better, rather than trying to show people that you know more than the speaker.

A key roadblock to good communication is a person's tendency to evaluate. Fortunately, if you can learn to listen with understanding, you can minimize your evaluative impulses and greatly improve your communications with others (Rogers, 1991).

A major foundation in any communication is detailing the assumptions and motivations of everyone involved. These cognitive boundary conditions create a web of understanding that is often neglected. If you disagree with someone's conclusion, it is likely that you will start to argue about the conclusion. Normally, however, the reason for a disagreement is something that was not stated rather than something that was stated.

One of the key aspects of sound communication that is not given enough attention is the definition of terms. I have sat in meetings with several system engineers discussing projects and detailed engineering issues only to find out that there were several critical parameters used often in conversation during the meeting whose definitions were not agreed upon in advance.

Communications is an important factor all throughout the innovation process for both interpersonal teambuilding and derivation of a specific innovative solution. In a recent Harvard Business Review article David McCullough stated that, if he were asked to create a curriculum for a business school leadership program, he would focus on the criticality of listening. He would emphasize the asking of good questions and scrutinizing what people do not say. (McCullough, 2008)

Communication is not easy, but it must be simple! Transmitting with clarity is much more important than transmitting with volume. Below is a list of compelling communication (transmission) techniques that I have found to be useful in my career. Using the SIMPLE acronym makes them easier to remember and, therefore, to use:

Transmission of Information (SIMPLE)

S Stories: use stories to make a message come alive. Storytelling is a key communications technique. (Guber, 2007) Share emotion, not just facts – personalize by using "we" not "I". Be true to teller, audience, the moment, and the mission. Senses: Increase number of senses being applied, sight - even smell and touch: e.g. "Think more strategically" is not as good as "increase your intellectual stride" and "Innovation Value Chain" is better than "Innovation Process".

I Intuition: go with your gut and what sounds right; trust your instincts.

M Mission: focus on the mission or objective. Before each person speaks up, he or she must first restate the ideas and feelings of the previous speaker accurately and to the speaker's satisfaction. P Power of threes: never have more than three dimensions of a discussion. Personal: examine wants and needs – deal with wants. Use people verbs (e.g. listen, learn, etc.) and not organizational verbs (e.g. consolidate, organize, etc.); Jim Collins (management consultant and author of Built to Last and Good to Great) stated: "Do not be interesting - be interested."

L Labels: use labels or names to get to the point and carry a message.

E Bridging Extrema: Being counter-intuitive makes it memorable which is half of the battle (e.g. pragmatic visionary, high tech – high touch, fascinatingly mundane, etc.).

Communications can often be thought of as having three dimensions: emotional, mechanical, and cognitive (Gallo, 2010). Emotional aspects of communication are passion, inspiration, and dynamic delivery. These characteristics are difficult to teach, but it is usually easier to have the emotional dimension of communication when you are discussing a topic that is important to you. Do not just say words; tell a story. Within the first fifteen seconds of you talking, people will decide if they are going to listen to you. So do not be boring, especially at the beginning of your talk.

Cognitive dimensions of communication are easier to incorporate. Put information into intellectually manageable chunks and always speak the language of the audience.

Single presentations should take no more than fifteen to twenty minutes for optimal information transfer, largely due to the short attention span of the listeners. On a micro level, it is also important to use short words and short sentences with no extra words. Make your point and then move on.

The last component of communications, mechanics, is the easiest to change: prepare, look good, be enthusiastic, vary your pace, vary your volume, make eye contact, start strong, and finish strong.

Power is often considered someone's ability to influence people and situations around him or her. So, logically, the greater the power, the more impact one can make on a team and on individuals within that team. Yet, this sortofcontrolactuallyreducesthecooperativebehaviorthatfostersteamwork. This teamwork is needed to create new ideas. The use of power to control others not only disrupts positive interactions between team members but also emboldens the leader to actually take over the team conversations and intimidate members even more (Tost, 2011).

While an overpowering leader with a lack of tact and a large ego is clearly bad, inhibiting communication by coming to the team with a complete vision is almost as debilitating. If a team is asked to work together on a challenge that the leader has completely figured out and the leader is not willing to listen to or consider inputs from the team, this sort of environment also results in poor performance (McGoff, 2011). In all situations, it is critical for all team members—especially the leader—to communicate by both transmitting and receiving with positive intent!

"Disagree without being disagreeable."

—Ronald Reagan

While the importance of communication has always been critical, the onset of electronic media has created both opportunities and problems. E-mail, text messaging, Facebook, and Twitter are new modes of communication that can be either useful or disastrous! E-mails seem almost archaic to many people in their day-to-day lives, but it is still the workhorse of business communications, as it provides the ability to communicate a complex message to whomever you want to receive it.

Some classic techniques to manage the crush of e-mails and maximize their utility are basic skills that people can also use in face-to-face communications:

– Give your reader the complete context at the start of your message. Do not make them read all of the previous threads of the message to be able to respond.

– Write e-mails with a sensitivity to the fact that people are busy. Get to the point!

– Use a subject line to summarize and convince the recipient to read your e-mail.

– When you copy more than three people (a practice that should be used sparingly), explain why each person should care. Do not waste peoples' time. Time is the most valuable resource for your colleagues and for you.

– Use blind carbon copy (bcc) only when the identities of recipients need to be protected. Always tell the recipients of the use of the bcc.

– The only reason you should be sending a message to many people is to give them a document or to coordinate information such as a meeting time. Never try to have a conversation or dialogue with more than three people! The probability that you will receive a response to an e-mail is inversely proportional to the number of recipients.

– Make action requests clear. It is best to put in the title of the e-mail "ACTION REQUIRED" or "ACTION REQUESTED" to make sure that there is no confusion.

– Never type an e-mail when you are angry.

– Assume that anything that you put in an e-mail will end up in the most embarrassing location (such as your boss's e-mail, the local newspaper, or your spouse's desk).

Unfortunately, in this day and age, communication norms cannot be discussed without considering texting, Facebook, and Twitter. The real success metric in any online network is that it solves social problems that cannot be solved offline, for example, through quick connections across long distances and across social demographics. Texting and tweeting are very simple and use limited words, so information is usually passed without proper context. This can be a problem since short messages received without an understanding of the sender's motive or situation can be easily misinterpreted. Facebook, on the other hand, is the other extreme. There is often almost too much context and content. Unfortunately, more information can sometimes be used for evil than for good if you have not vetted both the current and future intentions of your so-called friends.

The most interesting insight about Facebook is that it is primarily about pictures: 70 percent of all actions are related to viewing pictures or viewing other people's profiles. The most frequent visual users are men looking at women they don't know, followed by men looking at women they do know. This is a little embarrassing for the male gender, as two-thirds of all page views are of women's pages by men. In this way, online networks can be used as cover for less than forthright activities (e.g., job hunting, social spying, gossiping, etc.). Many users create relationships with others to stay in touch with peers and to make new contacts. Social media allows them to establish plausible deniability that they are not looking for jobs, even if they are (Silverthorne, 2009).

Twitter is different; women proportionately use it more than men. MySpace is seen as being passé and is not used very much, yet as of 2011, MySpace actually had seventy million US users, while Facebook had around one hundred million users. Twitter only had twenty million users in the United States. MySpace focuses on users in places where they don't have much contact with people who create news that gets read by others. In addition, the MySpace user generally makes less money than the average Facebook user. At the time of the writing of this book, statistics showed that Facebook user growth was slowing; a mathematical inevitability due to its initial explosive growth (Silverthorne, 2009).

"It's better to keep your mouth shut and appear to be stupid than to open it and remove all doubt."

—Abraham Lincoln

I recently attended a local gathering of Chief Technology Officers at which the guest speaker discussed social media and Enterprise 2.0. The speaker, Dion Hinchcliffe of Dachis Group, provided a statistic showing that social networking passed e-mail as having the most interactions between people in 2007 and continues to grow faster. I contend that more data and more connections are not necessarily better; rather, better data and better connections are what we need. Unfortunately, "better" is very difficult to measure.

So in that light, I hypothesize that Facebook and other social media are great to maintain and enrich existing friendships that have been formulated through old-fashioned face-to-face chats, shopping outings, or poker games, but it is not a great place to start a friendship. The two are not equal. Dion hinted at this concept as he quoted Clay Shirky, who said, "Information overload is not the problem. It's filter failure." I believe that the filter needs to be some foundation of real personal interaction that occurs before using the power of social networking; social networking should not be allowed to replace personal interactions. I will discuss this more in the essay "High Tech, High Touch."

Listen, Learn, and Write Things Down

Years ago I became frustrated when I repeatedly encountered situations that I knew had been introduced to me previously in books, conversations, or even past failures or successes. Yet, I just could not harvest the information from my feeble memory for my own use when I needed it. These books were already published or the events long since passed. I just wanted the two to three relevant sentences that I could retrieve and apply to my specific situation.

Of course, none of us have perfect memories, so how can we increase our chances of applying relevant information in the future?

I started to write down tidbits of useful information from these publications and encounters and stuff them into my briefcase. Soon, I was getting buried in little shards of knowledge. About ten years ago, I realized that I was collecting information in four major areas: technology, innovation, people, and strategy. These topics created a convenient acronym, TIPS. I started to type up these morsels of insight into a simple Word document.

I have maintained and grown this asset over the years. I make a habit of reading the now 125-page document at least once a quarter. Each time I have examined this treasure trove of quotes, excerpts, insights, ideas, and so forth I find something that is useful for my current endeavors. I really mean always. I have everything from article excerpts to comments made by professional colleagues at formal meetings to personal musings I committed to paper after watching a special on TV.

After relating the utility of the TIPS document to colleagues, I found that many, maybe even most, colleagues were intimidated by the prospect of reading over one hundred pages of content-rich, disjointed facts and insights. As a result, I started to prepare monthly book reports that provided summaries of books, articles, and papers that I had read the previous month. (By the way, in addition to old-fashioned books, I have found the Harvard Business School's "Working Knowledge" newsletter as well as Fast Company magazine to be the two best consistently useful periodicals for my techno-innovative-cognitive bent.)

My new book report product is a hybrid of Executive Book Summaries and a multidisciplinary blog with a thread of innovation philosophy running through it all. The book reports are much smaller and less imposing than my TIPS document, so they are almost always read by others, unlike the bulky TIPS collection.

The positive comments and dialogue created by the sharing of these bite-sized pieces of insight provided me with the impetus to write Hitting the Innovation Jackpot. People are just so busy now, but being introduced to multiple, seemingly disparate domains so critical to innovative thought, I knew I had to provide a treatise on innovation that could be the unifying framework. Unlike my massive TIPS document, this book is the coherent, refined compilation of my thoughts as I have reflected upon all of these documents and my own personal experiences in responding to real-world challenges over thirty years.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Hitting the Innovation Jackpotby Darren McKnight Copyright © 2011 by Dr. Darren McKnight. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse, Inc.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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