Innovation @ Merage - UCI Paul Merage School of Business : Innovation

Consequential Strangers: The Power of People Who Don’t Seem to Matter…But Really Do.

admin — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 19:53:00 GMT

By Melinda Blau and Karen L. Fingerman, W.W. Norton (2009). While this book builds on the established notion of weak ties being valuable information sources, it also offers a handful of insights into how those weak ties work in innovation. It starts with a simple self test: a list of 22 occupations. You check off whether you’re related to someone in that field, are friends with someone, or just know them as what you might call acquaintances—someone you could talk to. Most people know people in about six or seven of the occupations—the best performer could check off 19. According to Blau and Fingerman, the more of them you know, the more likely you are to get diverse experience, ideas, and more tools for solving problems. It even works virtually. When InnoCentive posted scientific inquiries, within four years 80,000 people had signed up—and the best solutions came from diverse groups of scientists in a variety of fields. This book is eye-opening on a personal level (you’re more likely to find a new job through these consequential strangers in your network than through friends and family), and it offers a number of examples that reinforce the importance of diverse opinions in creating breakthrough ideas. I’d give it an 8.5 on the LL Innovation Meter for anyone who wants to increase your own effectiveness or that of your team.

In Pursuit of Elegance: Why the Best Ideas Have Something Missing

Lynda Lawrence — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 22:28:00 GMT

By: Matthew E. May, Broadway Books, 2009

Refrigeration without electricity. Traffic flowing without traffic lights. A smart phone without a keyboard. Houses without living rooms. May makes a convincing argument that the human tendency is to add complexity, but subtracting is the key to real innovation.

Using a handful of stories, May explains the neuroscience behind why we leap to less-than-optimal solutions, why we feel good when we complete a Sudoko puzzle (or solve a business problem) and how to get people involved in solving problems by making the missing pieces exactly the right size to provoke our natural curiosity.

In this environment of cost-cutting and limited resources, it’s good to hear that the most elegant ideas emerge precisely when there are serious constraints. And that by looking at what we don’t need to do, we will always find better ways to do nearly everything.

He quotes Steve Jobs, “Focus means saying no to the hundred other good ideas…I’m as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things we have done.” And Jim Peters, of Good to Great fame, who starts each year deciding which things he’s going to stop doing.

For anyone in charge of streamlining processes, inventing new products, or just managing more with less, it’s an intriguing approach. I’d give it a 9.5 on the LL innovation meter, because it will make you think about everything a little differently.

Do You Matter? How Great Design Will Make People Love Your Company

Lynda Lawrence — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 23:30:00 GMT

By: Robert Brunner and Stewart Emory, FT Press (2009).

If you know anyone in love with an iPhone, you may understand the feelings that Brunner and Emery describe. According to them, this fierce devotion extends past the product to the company, and enables Apple to charge higher prices and be forgiven for any mistakes.

Does this apply to companies that don’t make the latest must-have gadget? Only if you concentrate on designing the customer experience as carefully as Apple has designed the entire experience of an iPhone purchase: the meticulous product design, the anticipation, the storytelling, the retail stores full of techies to answer questions, the exquisite packaging, the intuitive interface, the geniuses who do the set up, the follow-up emails, and the easy (and often free) downloading of thousands of apps you never realized you wanted.

If, and only if, you create a company that is focused on creating better-than-expected customer experiences, you can reap the benefits. That means top-down permission to play, no cutting corners, no incremental changes substituting for innovation (think Razr phones), quick prototyping, and even quicker response to the market (think GM).

While the recommendations are easier to apply to a product-focused company, they will apply to services. If you’re in charge of a small company that needs to innovate, or in charge of design and need to sell your ideas company-wide, this would be a good book to use.
I’d give it an 8.5 on the LL innovation meter—not a lot of new insight, but a persuasive argument.

The Designful Company: How to Build a Culture of Nonstop Innovation

Lynda Lawrence — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 23:24:00 GMT

By: Marty Neumeier: New Riders, 2009.

Despite its dreadful title, this little book is a gem. Neumeier explains why everyone should care about design (companies that win design awards have 100-200% higher returns, and must-have products are always because of good design). More important, he defines designers as everyone who makes something better, whether it’s an idea, a process or a product.

He also points out the difference between standard business thinking that measures “What is” and design thinking that posits “What could be.” Without the latter, he says, we’d all be driving the same cars and watching broadcast TV. As for getting these new ideas converted to reality, he has strong ideas about storytelling (good) and PowerPoint (bad).

Why should you care about design? Just substitute the words innovation or organizational change and you’ll see why his insights apply to just about everything you have on your to-do list for the next decade.

Definitely worth an hour of your time, I’d give it a 9.0 on the LL innovation meter. Recommended for managers, MBAs, and anyone interested in changing their organization’s status quo.

The Age of the Unthinkable: Why the New World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us and What We Can Do About It

Lynda Lawrence — Wed, 06 May 2009 23:49:00 GMT

By: Joshua Ramo: Little, Brown, 2009.

While it’s not strictly a business book, this is the best book for business that I’ve reviewed this year. It is, in fact, a whole new way of facing the future of any endeavor: Ramo suggests that the only way to deal with uncertainty is to accept that you can’t possibly predict anything.

He begins with an analogy from physics. When you methodically add single grains of sand to a pile, there is absolutely no way to tell which grain will cause an avalanche. Then, using examples from Google to Hizb’allah, he explains that no successful organization has a vision or strategic plan that can anticipate all the changes in a global and interconnected world. The successful ones, he says, are those that constantly adapt to change.

For most businesses, that attitude is too frightening to contemplate. Strategic planning, quarterly earnings projections, and overpaid executives are not guarantees of anything. Instead, he recommends that organizations think long-term, holistically and flexibly. It’s not innovation as a growth or survival strategy—it’s innovation as an organizational structure, a product and a philosophy.

This one gets a 9.8 on the LL innovation meter. I’d recommend it for anyone who wants to be part of a viable organization in the next few decades. And if any of our nation’s political leaders have the time, it should be on their reading lists as well.

Why We Make Mistakes

Lynda Lawrence — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 01:56:00 GMT

By: Joseph T. Hallinan; Broadway Books, 2009

Aside from having the cleverest (and most frustrating) cover in the history of publishing, Hallinan’s new book on the neuroscience of decision-making tells us a lot about why innovation is so hard to accomplish.

For the last couple of centuries, we’ve created a dichotomy between rational and emotional decisions, and most major decisions in business are supposedly made on purely rational terms. According to Hallinan’s research, however, there’s no such thing. Patients with brain damage that didn’t let them tap their emotions, who should have been making decisions better than Spock on Star Trek, couldn’t make even the smallest choices.

Our brains are designed to select between three and five items, and when we get more variables, we automatically revert to habit or emotion. He says you can choose a potato peeler on rational terms, but a car—not so much. Imagine then, what happens in business when you have an infinite number of variables and plenty of unknowns. Bingo. You revert to habit or emotion, and since we automatically distrust things we haven’t seen before, truly breakthrough ideas are killed. Then, of course, we rationalize those decisions because, after all, it’s business and it should be rational.

I’d give it a 9.5 on the LL innovation meter, good for anyone who has to make any kind of decision about anything. And let me know what you think about that cover.

Merage Students Apply Sustained Innovation to Global Social Issues

admin — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 22:03:00 GMT

Abstract: Merage School students are tackling problems with global implications — like poverty, global warming, school failure, childhood obesity and prison overcrowding. In the Topics in Strategic Innovation class taught by Professors Leonard Lane and Lynda Lawrence, students start with the basics: disruptive and incremental innovation, Blue Ocean Strategy which promotes a systematic approach for “making competition irrelevant,” and a framework for Business Model innovation that involves a culture of ideas, plus the people, practices and partners that can move an idea to a profitable reality.

Published: 2008/2009

Author: John Gregory

Key Drivers for Management Innovation

admin — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 21:47:00 GMT

Abstract: The Wall Street Journal recently pronounced Gary Hamel, author of Leading the Revolution and Competing for the Future, the world's most influential business thinker. In this short video, Hamel identifies some of the key drivers that necessitate management innovation.

Published: March 2009

Link: HSM

Organizational DNA for Strategic Innovation

admin — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 21:32:00 GMT

Abstract: Vijay Govindarajan, leading expert on Strategy and Innovation, explains how organizations need to develop their "Organizational DNA."

Published: March 2009

Author: Vijay Govindarajan

Link: HSM

Innovation Trickles in a New Direction

admin — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 20:55:00 GMT

Abstract: General Electric, Nokia and other companies are creating entry-level products for emerging nations and then repackaging them for more affluent countries in a process known as trickle-up innovation.

Published: March 9, 2009

Authors: Reena Jana

Link: BusinessWeek

When Service Means Survival

admin — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 20:30:00 GMT

Abstract: In a series of articles BusinessWeek explores innovative and pragmatic ways to maintain customer service in these uncertain times.

Published: March 9, 2009

Link: BusinessWeek

The Impossible Advantage: Winning the Competitive Game by Changing the Rules

admin — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 20:14:00 GMT

By Andreas Buchholz, Wolfram Wordeman and Ned Wiley; John Wiley & Sons, 2009.

While I was playing Candyland with 5-year-old Ashlynn last fall, she drew a bad card that would have sent her back to the beginning of the game. Her reaction? “I know, let’s play the same game, but change the rules.” Which is exactly the way the authors define their Game Strategy: changing the rules of the game to your advantage--while you’re playing it.

They develop four strategies:
1. Redefining the measure of performance (DeBeers grading diamonds)
2. Redefining the market structure (Red Bull creates “energy drinks” to avoid comparison with tastier soft drinks)
3. Redefine the roles (lawyers changing “jealous aggressive husband kills wife” to “bad racist cops frame innocent black guy OJ Simpson”)
4. Challenge the existing business model (dolls look like babies, dolls are fashion models, now dolls are counter-cultural lifestyle icons).

Examples range from German broadcast networks to pharmaceuticals, the iPod to outsourcing and all support the premise of changing the rules. Their four divisions, however, were hard to remember, and as practical tools for innovation, not as applicable as Blue Ocean Strategy or Christiansen’s Disruptive Innovation.

I’d give it a 7 on the LL innovation meter, thought provoking for someone who wants to break into a mature market or break out of the pack in a competitive market space.

Sprinting for Creativity

admin — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 21:59:00 GMT

Abstract: Author and blogger Seth Godin discusses a very effective technique to use when you're stuck.

Published: February 9, 2009

Author: Seth Godin

Link: Seth Godin's Blog

Social Network Lending - Solving the Credit Crisis One Loan at a Time

admin — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 21:21:00 GMT

Abstract: In an innovative approach to the credit crunch, next-gen lenders are teaming up to market their on-line services to consumers. Using a peer-to-peer model, these lenders offer an interesting alternative to the traditional credit market.

Published: February 25, 2009

Author: Anya Kamenetz

Link: Fast Company

What Would Google Do?

admin — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 20:07:00 GMT

By Jeff Jarvis; Collins Business, 2009

Take everything you know about business, turn it upside down, and that’s pretty much what Google is doing. If conventional wisdom suggests that people should pay for your product, Google’s is free. If you might support that weird business strategy by running ads on your front page, Google’s is absolutely pristine.

In Jarvis’s view, every business has a lot to learn from one of the few profitable companies in these turbulent times. He starts with some counterintuitive Google premises: give control away, make mistakes often, let your customers be your ads, niches are more profitable than mass markets, everything is public, get out of the way.

The last half of the book is where it gets interesting--rethinking the business models of major industries in the Google way: manufacturing, real estate, communications, airlines, insurance, education. There are some provocative ideas, and at the very least, some challenges to long-held assumptions that are worth pondering.

I’d give it an 8 on the LL innovation meter, good for anyone who makes strategic decisions or wants to start the next Google.

Lynda Lawrence is an innovation consultant with Ideaworks Consulting. She teaches Strategic Innovation and Design Management at the Merage School at UCI, and is an advisor to the Beall Center.