When I first began blogging I had no idea that my journey would take me to Amsterdam within six months as a guest blogger for the Front End of Innovation Europe 2010, an event sponsored by the (IIR) International Institute of Research.

Although I had vast experience selling emerging technologies and I represented internationally renowned thought leaders in the world of creative thinking and innovation, I was a novice at blogging. 

I had signed up for a social networking class with Sabrina Gibson.  We received our first assignment and we created a blogging strategy plan.

Now six months later, I responded to a bid to be a guest blogger for the Front End of Innovation Europe.  Imagine my delight and surprise when I was selected.  I was notified of my acceptance five days before the event would begin in Amsterdam. 

My assignment is to blog LIVE and post during the sessions while the speaker is actually speaking.  I also had to produce ten tweets each day of the conference and post on two websites, the website of Front End of Innovation Europe 2010 and my own website, Develop Your Creative Thinking.  I am up for the challenge.

Over the next three days, I worked 15 hours per day and generated 22 blogs within that time frame.  When I first arrived, I was asked if I had brought my camera.  I was taken by surprise.  I do not travel with my camera because I typically do not take photos.  Fortunately, I did have my iPhone with me and it has the ability to take photos.  Now, I realize not only am I to blog but I have to hop up and take photos as well.

When I returned home, I redid all of my blog posts.  Now they read much better and make more sense.  Despite many challenges, I am incredibly pleased with myself.  

Remember, it was only six months ago that I began blogging.  I am quite proud of what I have accomplished.  I assure you if I can learn to be this productive with social media and social networking due to the superb training from my incredible teacher, Sabrina Gibson, than you can also learn these same skills.  

I just want to express my deep gratitude to Sabrina Gibson for giving me the necessary skill set to prepare me to blog at a major international design thinking and innovation conference.  Thank you, Sabrina Gibson!

LIVE Front End of Innovation Europe 2010

Topic: Portfolio Planning Dos and Don’t: How to Launch a Successful Product

Speaker: Anthony Reese: Former Director, Mobile & Entertainment Portfolio Planning, PLANTRONICS

Launching a successful product depends on the way you structure your portfolio. Anthony Reese managed Plantronics with a framework and applied it to the development of Blue Tooth.

There are four portfolio elements:

1.) Customer Needs
2.) Organizational capabilities
3.) Channel and market cadence
4.) Organizational capacity

You add value by balancing each of these against the other. The way to choose to launch a product or not is by balancing these four elements.

Think about your customer needs:

1.) The core problem to see.
a. What the customer wants
b. Future needs
c. The 2 – 4 X factor list size
d. Mix of excites us or the WOW factor
2.) Identify and focus on the top priority.

Organizational Capabilities include:

• Strategize the vision
• Brand history
• Organizational structure
• Special knowledge and skills
-Core competencies vs. Differentiated competencies

Know your market channel and cadence.

• Identify the major players
• Number of channels
• Reset /Planning Windows
• Competitive presence and movement
• Breadth of offering

Here is an example. Every two years is the renewal term of phone plans in the U.S. Bluetooth headsets are replaced every year because customers lose them. This determines when to enter the market with a new product.

What is the cadence for Apple? Each year new products are unveiled at MAC world. This sets the timing for the portfolio.

Breadth of offering means that their distribution channels only want to limit the number of headsets that they offer to their customers.

For organizational capacity, these are the areas to keep in mind:

• Development Methodology
• Development Capacity
• Development Cycle Time
• Functional Equivalence

You need to build alignments between the company and the customer. Sort the problems you want to solve. Find efficient solutions; look for the 80/20.

Synch the pace both in the development area and in the market area. Evaluate customer and channel cycles, development cycles, and their established cadence between capacity and the market. Ask yourself, “At what speed do we need to be running?”

Your must strike a balance between all four portfolio elements.

Anthony then presented us with a case study for the Voyager Pro headset. First they had to figure out the core problem to solve. What does the customer want now? They could only do 2 or 3 programs, but the roadmap showed too much and they needed to resize their portfolio. How do they select the 2 or 3 that they can only do?

They asked themselves, “What makes headsets successful?” One product sells lots of units. Perhaps they could suggest improvements to the best seller? Do they need to throw everything out and start from scratch?

They made their decision based on organizational capacity. A premium high performance headset makes sense. They bought the precursor. Now who are the heavy users of headsets? Heavy users are truck drivers, taxi drivers, and professionals who are on the phone over three hours per day.

In terms of market and channel cadence, it is a challenge to be in a consumer space with competitors such as: AT&T, Best Buy, Target, Wal-Mart, and Sprint.

AT&T almost killed the headset, said they did not like it. However, Plantronics still moved forward with the headset because they had alignment. AT&T said they would not buy the headset. Plantronics had to ask themselves, should we do this, even without AT&T? There was a 50:50 chance they would change their minds.

However, some carriers asked, “Can you deliver these three months earlier? Their reasoning was so it would fit their reset cycle/planning window

Now it is time to evaluate their organizational capacity. They can only do 2 or 3 development projects. They considered how well it fit and the balancing requirements among all four portfolio elements:

1.) Customer Needs
2.) Organizational capabilities
3.) Channel and market cadence
4.) Organizational capacity

The project stayed in the portfolio. There are lots of ways to fail, but they used these four elements for alignment and balancing. You must strike a balance.

Success was achieved and they received many awards.

LIVE Front End of Innovation Europe 2010

Topic:
Part 2: Innovation Think Tank – Develop a Vision for the year 2050

Led by: Per Sandberg, Managing Director, WORLD BUSINESS COUNCIL FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

After listening to Part 1: Using WBCSD’s Vision2050 of a Sustainable World to Drive Corporate Innovation, attendees at the Front End of Innovation 2010 conference were invited to generate ideas for Vision 2050.

These are their ideas:

• With open innovation you lose control.
• The biggest challenges are the names: the toothbrush example, protecting the market brand and existing business structure. It is hard to create partnerships.
• The big companies and brands have resources and money.
• How can we convince them to abandon existing business challenges?
• Here is a different opinion. How could the future look like? Make it transparent; current business models are an inhibitor. Business models are preventing new types of partnerships.
• Low hanging fruit represents a large win referring to the McKinsey chart in Vision 2050.
• Recognize that in IT and the building industry, the way you purchase influences things.
• There is a lot of stuff you can do now; it does not take fancy things.
• In large organizations, there is a lot of inertia.
• Different viewpoint is that scale increases consumption in oil energy, 1% change. They used the same data set from McKinsey.
• Trying to stimulate grassroots for sustainability, the way forward is to do public-private funding.
• Needs to be focused and fast.
• Large corporations think long term very well. P&G began with candles.
• How do we finance, if the speed is too slow?
• It is unrealistic to rely on big corporations.
• Must have the politics of public-private partnerships.
• The average person will not be making the decisions.
• Create fast change by industry solutions.
• The internal organization is not conducive to innovation. Usually innovation occurs in R&D, or specialized departments.
• Innovation leads to financial performance.
• In bakeries the unsold buns are thrown away. This is not public knowledge. Public image was the driver that led to these results:

1.) Reduce by half in 10 years.
2.) Increase the value of the bread left.
3.) New products developed in 2 month, is multiplier by 100.
4.) Use bread as fuel.
5.) Lot of packaging is needed, use in biochemical or bio plastics.

• Smaller scale needed for innovation, important to parcel out the problem to small issues that can be solved. It is better to work in small teams.
• Megatrends: Intra entrepreneurship will play a big role.
• Can be accelerated, entrepreneurs can be glue for systemic change to occur. We need to incentivize entrepreneurs. Embrace entrepreneurs from all angles. They are driving change.
• We not want to waste bread but want to make money.
• Companies should not pretend to be something and do something else.
• FEI conference focuses on sustainable innovation with cases, etc.
• With a background in a chemical company, the challenge in the fashion or cosmetic industry is that as a supplier we have difficulties communicating with R&D, marketing, and not being able to talk to the right people. We need to remove the walls between different organizations.
• From organizational development, if you do not have a leader like Richard Branson, then your organization needs urgency. She had a prior experience in Shell. They had to work on composition on their oil. You can create a sense of urgency from the outside.
• In the U.S. nothing was learned from the banking crisis.
• Need a burning platform; this is needed to drive change. Ask yourself, what if tomorrow there is no more water? As a company we must question ourselves, and then we will innovate. What as a person what would you do?
• In the brewery industry, cans are recycled. They learned:

1.) Be on consumer top of mind. You need meaningful communication with the consumer.
2. ) Renovation reuses the bottle. Now label bottle, “Hello this is the 4th, 5th time you have seen me.” This changed the consumer mindset.

• Will not get big companies to agree at high altitude. Small companies are good at speed and entrepreneurial. Bring together small companies with funding provided by large companies. Use the leverage of both small and big companies.
• Lots of large companies have huge foundations, like the United Nation’s foundation. Address them and can make big changes occur.

• Summary of key points :

1.) Create sense of urgency
2.) Small bits of a problem
3.) Tools
4.) Project oriented approach, small teams
5.) Create Partnerships

LIVE Front End of Innovation Europe 2010

Topic:
Part 1: Using WBCSD’s Vision2050 of a Sustainable World to Drive Corporate Innovation

Speaker:
Per Sandberg: Managing Director, WORLD BUSINESS COUNCIL FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

Per Sandberg posed this question, “What innovation does the world need?” Vision 2025 was just launched in India.

Agenda:
• Argue that sustainability is the key driver for innovation.
• Describe what sustainable innovation needed to deliver.
• Dialogue how best to do sustainable innovation.

Based on the vision 2050 platform, gaps are identified to develop a pathway and identify areas of action. The idea is to clarify the business perspective, quantify market potential, and then agree on action points and next steps. Vision 2050 was run by 29 companies within 20 months.

They evaluated the sustainability status to see how are we doing? We plotted the quality of life and the ecological footprint. This identifies a sustainable quadrant for different nations. Countries such as Africa and the South American countries are using fewer resources than available but with a lower quality of life.

We only know one way of developing. How can we keep the quality of life with fewer resources, without overusing the resources? The status is that we are not doing well.

We are borrowing from the future. Over the next 40 years, we will see fantastic growth, more people, and more wealth. Growth means wealth and spending power. The global middle class is expanding. There is growth in the emerging markets. Global economic power is shifting. The top ten economies will change.

We are experiencing inertia with an accompanying inadequate policy response. There is degradation of water and degradation of resources such as oil.

To summarize, we will consume 2.3 Earths in 2050!

In Vision 2050, nine billion people will live well, and within the limits of the planet. Vision 2050 proposes using one planet.

This means that business as usual is not an option. Neither is policy as usual, financing as usual, nor consuming as usual. Innovation as usual is not an option either! We must build an attractive path.

Please read HBR: Why Sustainability Is Now the Key Driver of Innovation

“…sustainability is now the key driver for innovation. In the future only companies that make sustainability a goal will achieve competitive advantage”

How do we close the gap?

1.) Resources and carbon: halving CO2 emissions while doubling agricultural output.
2.) Costs: internalize cost of carbon, water and other ecosystem services.
3.) Consumption: change consumption patterns in favor of more sustainable lifestyles.
4.) Areas of activity: people’s values, human development, economy, agriculture, forests, energy and power, building, mobility, materials, etc.

What does it mean? It is all about resource efficiency around labor, productivity, and financial. We have a rising cost of capital with fluctuating prices. There is availability of raw materials, increasing complexity of risk, changing consumer behaviors, and evolving framework conditions. This creates significant business opportunities.

Key insights are:

1.) Global challenges will become key strategic drivers for business and innovation.
2.) There will be tremendous change.
3.) Opportunities abound for those who turn sustainability into strategy.
4.) Business must work closer with government and society worldwide to transform markets, prices and competition.

The needed radical resource efficiency improvement will require sustainable innovation by all means. Sustainable innovation is waiting to happen. We can begin by harvesting the low-hanging carbon fruit.

It takes 30 years for new energy technology to have market penetration. It is very possible to triple Africa’s agricultural yield. We can make IT work for sustainability. Systemic, integrated innovation is needed and attractive. We can form complex coalitions, do co-innovation with customers and competitive, suppliers. We can forge public-private partnerships.

How do we make it happen? How can we make systemic, integrated “sustainable innovation by all means” happen at a radical scale, with speed and performance?

Per Sandberg then invited the Front End of Innovation attendees to form an Innovation Think Tank to generate additional ideas for Vision 2050. Please go to blog post, Part 2: Innovation Think Tank to see the results.

Topic: Innovation Culture—Making Innovation a Team Sport

Speaker:
Urs Limacher: Senior Director Emerging Technologies, ZIMMER

Zimmer is a leading orthopedic supplier to orthopedic surgeons. The industry is 50 years old. They will be replaced by biological products. Their products do not heal.

Innovation culture involves a willingness for risk taking, curiosity, a willingness to change, openness for new things, and using one’s own initiative.
Urs Limacher handed out a graphical map illustrating seven success factors for innovation.

Success Factor #1: Provide clarity and guidance and build a strong case for change.

There are four basic growth strategies: strategic diversification, market development, products / service development, and market penetration. Whenever there is a gap then plan further activities according to the growth strategies listed above.

Success Factor #2: Collect and allow for every single idea.

They have 8000 people worldwide. They are not centralized and have virtual organizations at different sites. They do not report into R&D, marketing, or brand management. They are looking for ideas for process improvements and product improvements. Sources are both external and internal (focused here). They use ambassadors to bring ideas in from external sources. This way they get higher quality ideas. The time frame for an idea to be accepted or rejected is limited to 90 days.

Success Factor #3: Establish distinct roles and demands.

The not invented here syndrome will kill all radical ideas at the first level.

They have identified “Innovation Champions” with these attributes:

1. Able to identify customer needs, fields of opportunities and their innovations.
2. Form a pool of innovation champions—as trained tool specialists, they are able to hand on their knowledge to other employees –they push new ideas.
3. Serve as accelerator for innovations in order to inspire the 8000 Zimmer employees to be innovative – encourage and challenge the employees – assure management support.
4. Promote innovation and innovation management.

Success Factor #4: Break up silos and organizes virtually across existing structures.

By using the Innovation Champions, they enhance collaboration and team work across organizational boundaries. Supporting informal networks is important.

Success Factor #5: Nominate only the best volunteers. Look for both knowledge and expertise.

Be sure to review your selection over and over again. During the interview make sure people are really interested in learning about innovation.

Success Factor #6: Engage in “Give and take” – it is ongoing and you must do it in a systematic manner.

Success Factor #7: Promote your innovation system. You must communicate within the receiver’s Language.

Urs Limacher concluded with this quote:
“Don’t change culture – use it!” ~ Peter Drucker

By Connie Harryman, Applied Concepts Creativity
Guest Blogger IIR USA

Do you ever wonder if our current business models are serving our need to innovate? One of the keynote speakers at the Front End of Innovation Europe is Josephine Green, Senior Director of Trends and Strategy, Philips Design, Royal Philips Electronics.

Her background includes international sales and marketing. She is an acknowledged thought leader for future trends using social research for advanced strategy.

Josephine takes into consideration the complexity and interconnectedness of our socio-cultural values with emerging technologies. She acknowledges the benefits of creating new business models.

She reminds us that current management structures were set up to accommodate the needs of mass markets. Their primary focus is managing logistics. This has nothing to do with innovation. Current management is about command, control, and distribution.

For creativity and innovation to flourish, we have to create spaces where people can experiment. We must create an innovative environment where we can feel free to create a future that considers our complex and connected world.

Factors to consider include the need to introduce new thinking around our business models while considering the human element. We must consider the sustainability of development in our culture. We must be knowledgeable about the impact of processes we implement.

She asks us to imagine viewing the universe with childlike wonder with a willingness to explore new possibilities. We might go beyond our current notions of time and space.

This means engagement with artists, scientists, and academics. This allows us to explore the space between the creative and scientific disciplines.  Perhaps you can learn to trust in your own subjectivity and that of others as much as you do in objectivity.

In Josephine Green’s e-book, Democratizing the future, Towards a new era of creativity and growth, she tells us there are new ways to create value by transforming our worldview of social models.

We can create a transformation of new approaches with new tools, new research and innovation, new leaders, new networks and new partnerships. This all involves cross-disciplinary, cross-industry, cross-border and public/private collaborations that will create the industries and markets of the future.

I am pleased to announce that I have been selected to be a guest blogger for the Front End of Innovation Europe.  

I will be sharing many more posts with you about some of the most outstanding thought leaders in the field of creativity and innovation. They will be sharing leading edge ideas with us at the Front End of Innovation Europe on how to create a better future.
#FEIEUROPE