Incentivize Innovation that Escalates Me to We
We do this constantly in our work: we figure out macros and hacks that streamline and accelerate our work. A routine we might perform numerous times a day, becomes a habit we learn how to tweak and accelerate and perform faster to increase our own performance.
But what if our organizational cultures incentivized people to conjure hacks and macros that accelerated the work of the team, of the entire groups we collaborate with?
I had an interview with the VP of HR for a leading consultancy in India. He described a practice there to incentivize bigger thinking innovation we can all emulate. If an associate there figures out a faster, cleaner why of performing a routinized task, they are acknowledged and rewarded. Their work gets better, and the entire team benefits from their elevated capacity.
However, if they develop an innovative new process which lifts the productivity of their entire collaborative team, the recognition and reward is significantly larger. Because now the defining mindset and orientation shifts on what innovation really means. Innovation is now cast in terms of lifting the larger whole, the greater goal and purpose. Instead of being defined as personal and incremental, innovation is recast as the opportunity and expectation that everyone will both think of themselves constantly as part of a larger we.
Here’s an example of that idea in practice borrowed from a fortune 500 financial services company that does just that in spades. I had a cool conversation with their IT leader who encourages professionals on the team to post internally their custom hacks and scripts to a social platform for others to copy and build on. The practice has spurred a friendly cooperative competition among the programmers to post and defend their own cool custom hacks. Then, other pros in the IT group are encouraged to borrow that brilliance and build on these signature scripts, which again elevates the productivity of the greater whole. It encourages personal, creative expression, and it builds a shared network of signature solutions within the group.
Figure out how to not only recognize and incentivize individual creativity and productivity, but also create shared solutions that support everyone around them.
Read MoreThe Speed from Obscurity to Visibility
“Time is the most important thing that you take from a person and I have to deserve it, give something, and spark some feelings in the viewer.” – Onur Senturk
I’ve been collecting stories about how fast cool, new ideas, innovations, and talents can move from obscurity to world stage. Just a couple years ago Onur Senturk was a fairly anonymous computer graphics “motionographer” posting his own imaginative renderings on public platforms like Vimeo. Well, Vimeo certainly surprised him by naming him winner of their Motion Graphics Vimeo Award. Here is his winning video.
Now he’s been picked up by major studios and has rendered the opening graphics animation for Transformers, John Carter, and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, among others. Check it out:
You don’t have to buy them: The Collaborative Investment
I had a conversation today with a VP of Human Resources at one of the largest, and still fastest growing consultancies in India. He described a practice of accelerating innovation you can borrow today, which they have already shown to work in their business.
In the new frictionless economy, in which innovation in product and service can emerge from everyone, everywhere and for everything, not only do we need to bet on the creative innovative collaborations of the people within our own organizations, but we can also tap into the creative surge of small, nimble, companies without the deep formality and commitment of either acquisition or equity capital investment. Right now, there is a flood of new startups entering the world market. You don’t need to risk a stack of money to buy and leverage their expertise. Instead, build the “collaborative investment.”
Stay curious and open to those emerging small (even really small) businesses which show promise in delivering new market value, and cultivate those relationships, as both direct customers, and on a quid pro quo basis to stay ahead of the innovation curve. You might currently hold a leading market position, yet innovative ideas and solutions can come from all quarters of the market. And since the next killer app might notcome from inside your company, all the better reason to stay closely connected to emerging opportunities.
Here are a few ways you can collaborate with emerging businesses without formal monetary commitment:
Make visibility and marketing exchange commitments to the new partner
In this capacity, you have the power to recommend and refer existing customers to small companies showing promise, representing immense new opportunity for the small company, yet maintain a “watch and see” position to learn how the market responds. The startup gains the visibility the much larger company can offer while you remains a tacit partner in the promotional effort. This collaboration can then be formalized over time as the startup gains traction. For favored customer status, or even for an inside look under the hood of the killer app you are using, you can offer market visibility that would be otherwise unavailable because of their size.
Make internal referrals
Whatever cool, efficient, valuable product or service the startup is offering, you can bet another group or another division in the company can equally benefit from their service. If you are responsible for a particular product development initiative, you are certainly aware of similar efforts, funded from separate budgets in your own company that might benefit from the external partnership. Bonus: your internal referral will not increase your customer favorability, but also fuel the innovation of the service itself because the new division working with the startup is likely to push them in different ways.
Find small, promising companies and get close to them. Figure out what you can offer that would be of great value to your smaller collaborator to help their innovation grow.
Read MoreBalancing Global Vision with Local Relevance
At the moment, Andrew Deonarine is a third year medical resident at University of British Columbia (UBC) He has developed a passion for improving literacy in developing economies. A few years ago after a trip to India he was inspired by the One Laptop Per Child initiative to improve literacy around the world. And he wondered if there wasn’t an even easier and more ubiquitous platform for delivering literacy learning.
He is also a programmer and technology tinkerer. With a curious mind, he developed a big idea to use simple cellphones to be a platform for distributing literacy learning through PhoneCasting – a push technology in which anyone can author a brief engaging learning script and push-cast it out to deliver simple reading and math literacy to potentially millions of people. He calls it EduCell.
Inventive yes. But how does anyone know about it? They didn’t. Until, he learns about an InnoCentive challenge. He applies and his EduCell proposal wins. He is in talks with Nokia to develop and deliver EduCell universally. Through the innovation crowd-sourcing visibility of Innocentive, Andrew is changing the world. From Ontario.
This is a wonderful story, and indicative of how fast innovation can move in this frictionless economy. How important is speed to market? Last year Jim Barksdale, formerly of Netscape, spent 300 million to dig a gopher hole from the Chicago Mercantile exchange 825 miles to the New York Stock Exchange to lay direct-line fiber optic cable. Why? To gain 3 milliseconds in speed of trading information.
Competition is emerging from everyone, everywhere, and for everything – and one thing is clear: Our most powerful competitive advantage is in the hearts and minds of all the people throughout our global organizations, and we must unlock these capacities. Gone are the days when we could just buy diligence and expertise, and ask people to execute on the strategic bets of a very few in the corner offices. Now, only by tapping into those discretionary qualities of initiative, creativity and passion – that cannot be bought at any price – can we build the competitive value of the future.
Bruce Churchill, president for DirectTV Latin America, said the key to the 300% market growth was to remove the corporate directives from NYC and Miami that decided how and when and where their services were deployed in Latin America, and instead give autonomy and discretionary decision-making authority to the local operators. Who knows better than the people who live in Bogotá, Rio, and Caracas, the culturally relevant TV programming to provide, how to price it, the marketing that would make it stick in each locality.
Michael Byrne, president of Linfox, the biggest shipping and logistics operator in Australia said the key to their remarkable growth in India, Thailand, Vietnam, China and throughout southeast asia over the past ten years has been specifically because tap into the talents and give localized control over operations. With over 2400 employees in India, and as of my conversation with him last year, Linfox had exactly one Aussie ex-pat working there – and he’s not the boss either. By first providing a clear and singular vision of commitment to safety, excellence, product integrity and quality, Linfox provides the shared vision and values that provide the bedrock of the company, and then gives trust and operating control to the local markets for culturally nuanced execution.
Those organizations that learn to balance global unified vision with local relevance are those that will thrive in the new creative age.
Read MoreIncrease Accidental Intensity for Innovation
What do these products have in common? Anesthesia, cellophane, cholesterol lowering drugs, cornflakes, dynamite, the ice cream soda, the slinky, Ivory soap, NutraSweet, nylon, penicillin, photography, rayon, PVC, smallpox vaccine, stainless steel, Teflon. They were all invented by accident. Of the more famous examples, microwave ovens were first invented by Percy Spencer, the 5th employee of Raytheon. Percy, a curious and skilled engineer, was responsible for scaling up the production of magnetrons for military use in radars. One day in 1946, while walking past one of the magnetrons, he noticed the candy bar in his pocket was melting. Curious, he started experimenting with popcorn and eggs, and immediately discovered the heat generating qualities of magnetrons. The first commercially available microwave oven, the 750 pound Radarange, became available in 1947.
The relationship between error and progress is undeniable. There is intentional innovation, and then there are accidental outcomes beyond intention. Often accidental innovation can be the most powerful and profound. So, we have to want accidents, and induce and examine them, to accelerate innovation. Fail faster, the saying goes.
Since this is true, we need to shift our mindset regarding acceptance and generation of accidents. We should:
1. Look for accidents, and harvest them for value
2. If valuable accidents aren’t frequent enough, generate some
3. Recognize the conditions under which the valuable accident occurred, and try variations on those conditions to magnify valuable accidents
To allow and recognize these happy accidents, we have to set up the right conditions and then be mindful of the changes there to be observed. Here’s one suggestion to magnify your accident intensity, hack your day. One of the most important things we can do is to build variation into our habits. This will increase accidental frequency. Robert Austin, Harvard Business School, interviewed a number of artists who constantly experiment with their method to create new work. One artist described finishing a clay piece and then, before it cured, hitting it with a bat to see what new shape occurred.
I’m suggesting to build both conditional variation and curiosity to recognize the emerging value in the change. But don’t overdo it. You will find a ceiling at which you are able to recognize and harvest value out of the variation you are creating. Don’t let the volume of noise exceed the measurable signal level.
Scott Wallace, in his book The Unconquered, describes trekking through the rich biodiversity in the remote Amazon basin and complained he wished he had the time and skill to slow down and harvest the incredible medicinal value all around him.
Read MoreDon’t save Par, make Birdie
“You don’t know how strong you are, until being strong is the only option you have.”
There’s an old adage that suffering yields ingenuity. The list is deep of artists, innovators, and inspiring leaders who found strength in the depths of adversity. It’s a beguiling truth since we tend toward safety and risk aversion in most aspects of our lives and business. So the question becomes, “If we aren’t currently in the depths of adversity, how do we find deep creativity and inspiration within contentment?” Or a better question might be, “How do we intentionally perturb ourselves in the search for creativity and inspiration?”
Statistically it’s true that golfers become better putters when faced with making par versus making birdie, from the same distance, with the same lie. We have surety and conviction when attacking the status quo, and make poorer choices when reaching beyond ourselves to excel, even when the goal remains the same. When we are on the edge of social risk, we retract, concede, and assimilate back to the norm – we make par.
Try this:
Choose between getting $900 for sure or a 90 percent chance of getting $1,000.
A. Getting $900
B. 90 percent chance of getting $1,000
Choose between losing $900 for sure or a 90 percent chance of losing $1,000.
A. Losing $900
B. 90 percent chance of losing $1,000
See below for the analysis, but the answer is clear. If you, like most people, chose A and then B, you could well be $100 down at the end of this exercise. What’s your social risk tolerance? What’s your measure of personal need for gain?
Read More(Jamie Lalinde, Vanity Fair) The results of this simple problem set, for which most participants answer A and then B, were used to develop the thesis that would make Kahneman and Tversky famous: prospect theory.
In a 1979 paper, they documented a peculiar behavioral tendency: when people faced a gain, they became risk averse; when they faced a loss, they became risk seeking. As a result of their discovery, Kahneman and Tversky debunked Bernoulli’s utility theory, a cornerstone of economic thought since the 18th century. (Bernoulli first proponed that a person’s willingness to gamble a certain amount of money was a product of how that amount related to his overall wealth—that is, $1 million means more to a millionaire than it does to a billionaire.)
Along with playing a large role in Kahneman’s being awarded the Nobel Prize in 2002, the theory also spawned a new academic pursuit, the field of behavioral economics. Prospect theory, Michael Lewis writes, explains “why people are less likely to sell their houses and their stock portfolios in falling markets; why, most sensationally, professional golfers become better putters when they’re trying to save par (avoid losing a stroke) than when they’re trying to make a birdie (and gain a stroke).”