Day 1
Giam Swiegers - Deloitte CEO
Discussed 3 Horizons Model. Referenced a HBR article on mistakes in H2. H1 whatever we do, we deliver. Two hats - H1 is disciplined delivery, H3 is fail quickly and cheaply. Comparisons of products from H3 into H1 will not work. Deloitte Australia has a dedicated innovation program that has delivered 3.16% growth in profit, and 1.89% growth in revenue from 2003-2007.
Good quote: "man who says it can't be done, should not interrupt man doing it"
Innovation Program Structure:
- 10 person SLT - get vision
- 40 partners - workshop ideas
- 60 non-partners - workshop ideas
- Go into your adjacent space
- contribution in dollars and professional time
David Beath - Jumeirah Group, Dubai
Dubai businesses involved with tourism, trade, construction and finance. Innovation is embraced by the government of Dubai. Brand holding structure for Dubai Holdings. Jumeirah is the world's most luxurious hotel company.
Long tail slide:
1. has fewer ideas of greater value implemented
2. has high number implemented
We must innovate faster than our competitors. Stay Different:
- communication (enhance)
- encourage colleagues to get involved
- appropriate rewards and recognition
David didn't really know what the focus for innovation should be, "we sell memorable experiences". They ask customers to co-produce the future of the company. Combine customers and colleagues feedback and ideas. High net worth customers have three areas of focus - guilt, responsibility, sustainability.
From concept to realisation:
- H1 incremental exploits, core business
- H2 growing
- H3 seeding ideas
Leaders set standards and people deliver on them. IDEO also working with Jumeirah. Focus on delivering value back to shareholders as we innovate. Asset management company so there is no unlimited innovation budget.
Frans Johansson - The Medici Effect
Best chance to innovate happens when you combine wildly different ideas - The Intersection. The company lifecycle is shrinking. Key message: Diversity Drives Innovation.
But how do you create the Medici Effect in a company? Maybelline uses diverse teams to drive innovation. Combining different experiences, approaches, concepts and traditions. Fact - innovative people generate and execute more ideas. Not easy to predict what will work and what doesn't. Can't just bet on one thing. There are more ideas generated at intersections of cultures and diversity.
Permutations & combinations. Muliplier effect if you combine total numbers of ideas at intersections. EG, applying sneaker technology to tyres.
- dare to explore connections, inspiration from fields or cultures other than your own. Experience, network, learning, doing >> to come up with ideas. Curiousity and free thinking. Candy and computers - what do they have in common?
- staff for innovation and diversity - functional diversity
- leverage existing diversity - fight against human nature to find similar people
- ignite an explosion of ideas by widening contributions. Eg, Volvo car designed by a team of women that has a hatch for washer fluid so there is no need to open the hood.
- intersection of ideas from global offices
- seek intersection of engineering and design
- diverse teams outperform quickly. Leadership quality is the ability to get a diverse team up and running
- contribute ideas and then make those ideas happen
- plan for mistakes
- think differently about risk. Adjusted behaviour in the face of the risks around you, eg when driving! Many start-ups have spending related to only what they could afford- an idea plus a little money.
If you wish to drive change stepping into intersections is not risky. Diversity sets foundation but you need tools, techniques and passion. Different thinking on future leadership - diversity of the individual experience is required as industries disappear.
Megan - Lead Experience Designer for DIFFERENT
Experience architect - good experience from end to end for solution development. Focus on what it is that people are doing. The future is moving from logical to emotional. The way you feel about the experience.
Affinity diagrams - what is the customer experience? This is the way we buy solutions. Shadow clients to find out what is really going on (rather than relying on surveys about what they think they do). Give insight into the "unspeakable". Ask customers to complete logbooks and diaries to capture information over a longer period of time.
Issue a disposable camera with instructions - concentrate on something different. Be your own anthropologist. Experience marketing using paper prototypes - prototype, test and iterate cycle.
Richard Watson - Future Files, History of Next 50 Years
Google trend maps, future trends and innovation. Aging population is more significant than Gen Y. Targetted at 55+. Speeding up is important. Digital instant gratification - if it takes too long then they are gone.
We love to panic right now. Apocolyptic thinking is associated with periods of rapid change. The history of innovation is at some level about technology. The internet is based around information now. Massive change for media companies. Time and place shifting. Web 2.0 and the move from competition to cooperation. User generated trend will impact media (and technology and software).
Retail trends - localisation. Globalisation could be dead. Walmart now stocks 66 types of chilli but only 6 varieties per store depending upon location.
Household trends - lots of people living on their own will lead to a boom in outsourced services
Health trends - business change over from one to the other. Telemedicine for remote diagnosis.
Transport trends - GPS & tracking for environmental purposes
Work trends - more values focussed
Opportunities & Risks - Can't keep secrets in the future. It will be physically impossible.
Paul Carter - Cochlear Innovation Manager
Don't think they are innovators. Process as the enemy of innovation. Sometimes being a technical company can hold you back. Cochlear innovation example - using a magnet to position the receiver over the implant.
The 4 I model of Innovaiton:
1. Involvement - stakeholder needs, knowledge, technology
2. Inspiration - culture, systems
3. Investigation - constraints
4. Implementation - product development process
Team activities to build idea culture and teamwork. BIDS - bright ideas development system, a collection system on their intranet with a process behind it. Employees need time to innovate.
Dr Robert Kay - Westpac
Creating an explore organisation (H3). Embedding a customer outcomes view of services innovation. Focus on the customer and their unmet needs. James March - Explore, Exploit (1991).
Companies such as Westpac are generally recognised as being effective, well managed exploit organisations with good shareholder returns. Explore is not about best practice but about changing practice. The money to fund explore activities comes from "exploit" businesses.
Characteristics of Explore:
1. Innovation Panel, Governance Structure - this is a leadership group
2. Protected funding
3. Culture, rewards & recognition, learning
4. Stage-gated pipelines - 3 horizons are similar to multiple pipes to distinguish opportunities from existing strategy of the bank
5. Rapid prototyping
Open sourcing approach to innovation
If we don't solve customers unmet needs we are irrelevant to the organisation. 4 unmet needs:
A. identify new sources of growth
B. provision of low risk explore capital
C. rapid prototype
D. engaging staff
Day 2 - Chair Gerhard Vorster, Deloitte
Dr Craig Mudge - No one can do it alone!
Silicon Valley as an ecosystem. It is a network of people who used to work together... Students as inventors, disseminators and part of the workforce. The whole valley is an incubator.
VC's role is partner, customer, recruiter, providing constant management guidance, strategy review, coaching, guidance on liquidity, help with advisory board and funding.
Empathy is the top innovation attribute. Entrepreneurial mindset:
- opportunity obsessed
- not risk adverse, but manages risk
- optimistic
- persistent
- technology innovative
- passionate
Hafeez - Deloitte Digital, Distortion Theory
Idea design + Willing networks = Distortion
Amazon and SOA example - the real plug and play. Build a system with an infinite number of middlemen. Change the design of the enterprise to allow the outside world to execute all those ideas that you can't execute. Alexa - way back (back up for the internet) are opening up their storage back end and their scalable infrastructure to a managed services model. Ripple.org example.
Make the device do something unnatural!
I stand corrected on this one! This should actually read "Make IP do unnatural things"...(Sorry Hafeez!!!)
Tom Kelley - 10 Faces of Innovation
The problem with innovation is in principle that everyone is for it! BUT unfortunately innovation lives in Quadrant 2 (Global CEO Survey) - important but not urgent.
Pace of innovaiton is fast and we must keep up. "A brand new world" Scott Bradley.
The Red Queen Effect - innovation not getting us anywhere. Alice and the Red Queen are running, if you want to get somewhere else you need to run twice as fast. Eg, is Sony vs Samsung in the US market. Samsung wasn't the brand that consumer sought out. The CEO employed an anthropological approach to fix this. Sony didn't stop innovating, they just slowed their pace.
10 faces of innovation:
1. the anthopologist
2. the experimenter
3. the cross-pollinator
4. the hurdler
5. the collaborator
6. the director
7. the experience architect
8. the set designer
9. the care giver
10. the story teller
The first three are learning roles. The next 3 are organising roles. The last 4 are building roles. The 3 most important are the learning roles.
1. The anthropologist
Gaining new insights on latent customer needs via first hand observation. Biggest single source of innovation. 5-step process - understand, observe, visualise, evaluate/refine, implement.
- Understand snapshot of the world as it currently stands
- Observe users of existing products
- Visualise innovation opportunities
- Evaluate with user testing and iterations
- Implement - design and build
Deja vous versus "vous ja de" - been in the same place a million times but with fresh eyes. Eg, the airline oxygen mask does not inflate when it falls from the ceiling, so how do you know that it's working??
Consumer testing only works in their frame of experience. Our customer has no idea about what might happen in the future. Breakthrough innovation comes from observation not asking questions. We are immersed in our own environments and just stop seeing stuff. Don't know who invented water but it wasn't a fish.
"Keep the change" concept for cheque accounts at Bank of America yeilded 2 million new accounts, and 700,000 brand new customers for the bank. Automatically round up cheque amounts and put the difference in a separate savings account.
2. The Experimenter
Innovation as a trial and error process. WD-40 what does the WD stand for? Water Displacement 40 because the first 39 attempts failed. Dyson created 5127 prototypes before his successful vacuum cleaner. You need to lower the bar on prototyping to increase the rate of learning. "learn to squint" at the shape of an idea. Create multiple prototypes, not just one, so that they can choose one and not reject the only version.
3. The Cross-Pollinator
Gathering inspiration from other divisions, other industries & countries. T-shaped have empathy across disciplines, coupled with deep knowledge in specific areas. I-shaped people have deep knowledge only. Genuine interest in stuff outside themselves. You need respect for the other disciplines. Eg, Muji in Japan - plainly branded items.
Observations of a car race pit crew led a doctor to innovate by pre-kitting the emergency room. So look outside your industry but also look for REVERSE MENTORS to tap into young ideas. So look outside your generation. IDEO has no clients with a surplus of good ideas.
The change in large organisations is the shift from problem solvers to solution finders.
Amnon Levav - Systematic Inventive Thinking
Take an existing situation, manipulate it, and create a virtual product. Market filter (can we sell it), product filter (can we make it), and then adaptations.
Key concept - division. Take a simple product like an airconditioner and divide it into elements or parts. Structural fixedness, certain things should have certain structures based on history of product. Amnon's challenge was to think of a way to replace bulbs in stadium lighting. Solution was to separate bulb (on ground) and relfector (on post).
Innovation is a discipline. A truism - build out from what you already have.
Peter Williams - CEO Deloitte Digital
Barriers to innovation exist in people's minds and emotions, so prototyping helps to get over that. Barriers include short term focus, certainty versus exploration, rigid versus dynamic/biological.
The business case as a POYA (pull it out of your ass). Instead prototype, learn and then business case. Align funding with metrics, resources (money and people's time).
Ryan Trainor - Ideas @ Work
Entrepreneurs in the corporate environment. Join with large organisations to take something to market. Engineering entrepreneurial success.
Identify:
- hook - what problem are you trying to solve?
- adoption dependencies
- value and revenue drivers
- where are you in relation to the curve?
- who owns the space?
Use cash wisely (know your limitations)
- outsource where possible
- leverage network to establish
- always pitch in person for credability.
Creative people need to understand the problem to solve it. Ideas come from the whole of life experience.
My question to the panel related to radical innovation in large companies - possible? Most of the conference seemed to relate to incremental innovations? Should a large company simply sit on their hands and wait for the upstart competitors to overtake them? or the next big thing to wipe us out before we act?
Answers - Amnon, radical innovation is over rated. Just a set of incremental innovations. Tom - have a portfolio of safe bets versus high flyers. Customers can help with incremental innovation. Anthropologists should set us apart and figure out the stuff the customers don't even know that they need yet (emerging technology).
Other notes:
IDEO works on the patient experience, but the employee is also part of the experience.
Remember no-one asked a customer if the iPod would be a good idea. They just build it.
