Oft sind Menschen, die gerade eine gute Idee hatten, nicht dazu bereit, über ihre Idee zu sprechen. Sie haben Angst, dass ihnen die Idee gestohlen werden könnte.

Nach meiner Erfahrung ist diese Gefahr ziemlich gering, denn wirklich innovative Ideen stellen immer eine Herausforderung an den Status Quo dar, mit dem Ergebnis, dass sie von den meisten eher abgelehnt werden. Dies ist übrigens auch eines der schwierigsten Probleme in der Ideenfabrik: der Auftraggeber erzeugt wirklich gute Ideen aber lehnt sie sofort ab.

Zwei Zitate sollen diese Beobachtung untermauern:

Good ideas are not adopted automatically. They must be driven into practice with courageous patience.

(Gute Ideen werden nicht autmatisch übernommen. Sie müssen vielmehr mit Mut und Geduld implementiert werden.)

Hyman Rickover

Don’t worry about people stealing an idea. If it’s original, you will have to ram it down their throats.

(Machen Sie sich keine Sorgen, dass andere Menschen Ihre Idee stehlen werden. Wenn sie gut ist, werden Sie sie ihnen in den Hals stopfen müssen.)

Howard Aiken

]]> http://www.zephram.de/blog/2010/07/18/keine-angst-vor-dem-ideenklau/feed/ 0 http://www.zephram.de/blog/2010/07/11/the-innovation-hype-cycle/ http://www.zephram.de/blog/2010/07/11/the-innovation-hype-cycle/#comments Sun, 11 Jul 2010 22:15:52 +0000 Graham http://www.zephram.de/blog/?p=2485

While listening to a presentation by Gartner Inc. recently, I learned about the Gartner Hype Cycle. Gartner consults in the field of information technology, and they developed the hype cycle in the 1990s as a way to visualise the phases the media go through when reporting on a new technology. Gartner claims that, in 1999, they used this tool to predict the Internet bubble of 2000.

According to the Gartner model, media coverage of a new technology goes through five distinct phases:

1. Trigger. The new technology is presented to the world, for example as a scientific discovery or a product launch.
2. Inflated Expectations. In the second phase, a large amount of publicity generates over-enthusiasm and unrealistic expectations.
3. Disillusionment. Technologies fail to meet expectations and quickly become unfashionable. Consequently, press coverage diminishes rapidly.
4. Enlightenment. A small number of businesses or universities develop an understanding of how the technology can be used appropriately.
5. Productivity. The technology becomes stable and evolves into second and third generations. It is applied where appropriate and does a useful job.

I immediately realised that this model can also be applied to the way new innovation methods are treated in the media and that it illustrated a thought that I have had for some time. However, I also recognised that the diagram in the form proposed by Gartner was insufficient to represent what I wanted to say.

The Gartner cycle is drawn in the space-time plane: the horizontal axis represents time and the vertical axis represents the level of hype about a technology (see here, here and here for some examples.) This representation only allows one relationship to be mapped: the one between hype and time. However, I also wanted to display the adoption of the technology / method, something which is only contained implicitly in Gartner’s model. I therefore switched to a phase space representation, with Level of Adoption on the horizontal axis and Level of Hype on the vertical axis. This allows me to display the behaviour of both over time. The result is shown in the following diagram:

Here, we can still see Gartner’s five phases, as changes in the vertical coordinate of the curve. We begin at the lower left with the Trigger, where there is no hype yet, advance along the curve where we see hype sharply increasing and then decreasing, and end up at Productivity, where the hype has converged to a level that is appropriate. At the same time, we can follow the horizontal development of the curve, where we see zero adoption at the Trigger, followed by an increase in adoption as a consequence of the hype, where many companies adopt the method, even though it is not appropriate to their needs. This is followed by a decrease in adoption as reports about the failure of the method to live up to its expectations become available. Ultimately, at the Productivity stage, the adoption converges to a level at which the method is being used by those companies for whom it is an appropriate tool.

In the title diagram, I have included a number of popular innovation methodologies, placing them where I currently see them in the “innovation” hype cycle.

• Stage Gate Process. The Stage Gate Process is now well established and used by many companies as a standardised framework for their innovation process. Although the stage gate process ia still being developed, most companies have found a form which suits their needs and are applying it as a productive tool.
• Lead Users. The hype about the Lead User method seems to have died down now, as companies try to figure out when the method is appropriate to them and how best to apply it.
• Disruptive Innovation.  Hype on disprutive innovation was still very intense last year, but seems to be yielding to newer topics as companies realise that disruptive innovation only describes one very specific type of innovation and is not the magic bullet that it once seemed to be.
• Crowdsourcing Ideas. Commonly (but incorrectly) referred to as “Open Innovation”, Crowdsourcing Ideas was the “big thing” in 2009 and the first part of 2010. Internet platforms for crowdsourcing ideas sprung up all over the internet and companies from BMW (“Virtual Innovation Agency“) to Starbucks (“My Starbucks Idea“) started portals where members of the public can submit their ideas. While this is clearly not a viable approach in most cases, the hype about this topic is still very strong, and we have yet to see the first (public) reports on the limitations of this approach.
• Design Thinking. This seems to be the current “Big Thing” in innovation; it gets most column inches in the various innovation blogs and discussion forums. It is still unclear (at least to me), how useful this concept is for innovation as a whole and therefore how dramatic the disappointment will be when it comes.

One nice thing about the phase space representation of the hype cycle is that it allows different variants of the cycle to be plotted. In the diagram below we see

• the Canonical Form (blue), which corresponds to the phases already described,
• the Flash in the Pan (red), which drops back to zero quickly as people realise that they have been fooled into following a valueless management fad.
• the Quiet Revolution (green), where a new concept or method remains below the hype radar and slowly gains in popularity and coverage as word of its usefulness spreads.

Some assorted observations on the innovation hype cycle:

• I think that Crowdsourcing Ideas is actually on the Flash-in-the-Pan curve, since I do not believe that it has any substantial value for innovation.
• You can recognise when a concept has entered the Disappointment phase when you start to see blog articles titled “What is wrong with Crowdsourcing?”, “Beyond Crowdsourcing”, “Crowdsourcing 2.0″ and so on.
• I have no idea what method or technique will be the next to become visible on the innovation hype cycle.
• I would place Blue Ocean Strategy in roughly the same location as Disruptive Innovation in the cycle.

Der amerikanische Autor Zig Ziglar hat einmal gesagt:

Das meiste Unglück kommt daher, dass man das wählt, was man jetzt haben will, statt das, was man am meisten haben will.

Ganz ähnlich lautet eine Definition von Selbstdisziplin in der Selbsthilfe-Literatur:

Selbstdisziplin heißt, das zu wählen, was man am meisten haben will, statt der Versuchung nachzugeben und das zu wählen, was man jetzt haben will.

Im persönlichen Bereich setzt der Erfolg eine langfristige Perspektive voraus sowie die Bereitschaft, im Sinne dieser Perspektive zu handeln.  Dieses Handeln kann jedoch oft unbequem sein, und es steht häufig in Konkurrenz mit angenehmeren Alternativen, die eine sofortige Befriedigung versprechen. So muss sich ein Student entscheiden, ob er sich abends lieber auf eine Prüfung vorbereitet oder mit seinen Freunden ins Lokal geht, ein Sportler hat die Wahl zwischen Trainieren und Faulenzen, und nahezu jeder Erwachsene, der schlank bleiben will, muss täglich zwischen gesunder Ernährung und ungesunden (aber leckeren!) Sußigkeiten entscheiden.

Durch unsere Arbeit als Dienstleister lernen wir bei Zephram viele Unternehmen und deren Innovationsstrategien kennen, und ich werde dabei gelegentlich an dieses Zitat über Selbstdisziplin erinnert. Besonders bei den Aktiengesellschaften scheint ein kurzfristiges Denken vorzuherrschen, das nur bis zum Finanzergebnis des nächsten Quartals reicht. Entsprechend reduziert sich der Blick für Innovationen auf die so genannten Quick Wins – die kleinen Innovationen, die einfach und billig durchzuführen sind und die eine schnelle Amortisierung versprechen. Ideen mit einem längerfristigen Horizont oder mit einer eher strategischen Bedeutung sind dagegen nicht gefragt. Anders verhält es sich bei mittelständigen Unternehmen, die dem Gewinnbegehren fremder Aktionäre und Fondsmanager nicht ausgesetzt sind. Hier sehen wir häufiger ein ausgewogene Sichtweise, die kurz-, mittel- und langfristige Innovationen umfasst.

Letztendlich ist es das langfristige Überleben, was ein Unternehmen am meisten interessieren muss. Um dies zu sichern, sind jedoch Investitionen, grundsätzliche Innovationen und Risiken erforderlich. Diese stehen aber im Widerspruch zur kurzfristigen Gewinnmaximierung – das heißt, zu dem, was das Unternehmen jetzt haben will.

Nun ist diese Beobachtung nicht gerade neu, und die Probleme, die durch Anreizsysteme mit kurzfristiger Gewinnorientierung verursacht werden, sind spätestens durch die Finanzkrise für die Gesellschaft deutlich geworden. Um zu einer nachhaltigen Lösung zu kommen, gilt es für die Unternehmenseigentümer und -lenker, wie auch im persönlichen Leben, Selbstdisziplin zu praktizieren und zugunsten eines langen und gesunden Lebens etwas häufiger einen Apfel zu essen und auf Schokolade zu verzichten.

Das Wort “Innovation” wird seit einigen Jahren inflationär gebraucht. Es taucht inzwischen in zahlreichen Unternehmensprofilen und Sonntagsreden von Politikern auf. Wie bei einer Währung führt die Inflation auch bei einem Begriff zu einer Entwertung: Wenn jeder behauptet, innovativ zu sein, hat die Behauptung bald keine Aussagekraft mehr.

Auch die Hochschulen fördern diesen Trend. So taucht das Wort immer häufiger in den Selbstdarstellungen der Universitäten auf. Viele Professoren sind auch der Meinung, weil sie wissenschaftliche Forschung betreiben, wären sie schon qua Amt innovativ. Dabei sind sie möglicherweise kreativ, aber Kreativität ist nicht gleichbedeutend mit Innovation.

Der Präsident der Fraunhofer Gesellschaft, Hans-Jörg Bullinger, hat diesem Missverständnis folgenden hübschen Spruch entgegengesetzt:

Forschung ist die Verwandlung von Geld in neues Wissen; Innovation ist die Verwandlung von neuem Wissen in Geld.

Universitäten nehmen gerne Geld entgegen, um daraus neues Wissen zu erzeugen, aber wie viele von ihnen nehmen auch die Strapazen und Risiken des umgekehrten Weges auf sich?

(Fotoquelle: http://www.fraunhofer.de)

Vor Kurzem haben wir einen Innovationsworkshop für einen Kunden in einem Vier-Sterne-Hotel durchgeführt. Dieses Hotel wirbt mit seinem “Perfect Meeting Concept”, das in jedem Raum an der Flipchart prangt. Leider war der Raum für das Arbeiten völlig ungeeignet: Die Decke hing tief, die Fenster waren klein, und es gab nur eine Dämmerbeleuchtung, die sich zudem nicht regeln ließ. Darüber hinaus schien das Hotelpersonal nicht auf die Betreuung von Workshops vorbereitet zu sein.

Seminare und Workshops scheinen ein lukraktives Geschäft zu sein, denn nahezu jedes Hotel bietet heutzutage entsprechende Pakete an. Nach unserer Erfahrung erfüllen aber die wenigsten von ihnen auch nur die Grundbedingungen für ein gelungene Veranstaltung – selbst wenn sie vier Sterne über der Eingangstür hängen.

Die wohl häufigste Falle ist die Raumkapazität, denn Hotels teilweise mit absurden Kapazitäten für ihre Meeting-Räume werben. So will beispielsweise das Alleehotel Europa in Bensheim in einem 80qm-Raum 50 Personen in der Bankettbestuhlung unterbringen. Dies entspricht 1.6 qm pro Person. Das Hyatt Regency Paris Charles de Gaulle behauptet sogar, es könnte im 450qm-großen Saal 450 Personen (1 qm pro Person) und in einem 80 qm-Raum sogar 100 Personen (0.8 qm pro Person) unterbringen. Solche Personendichten schaffen eine  Atmosphäre, die eher zu einer Sardinenbüchse passt als zu kreativer Gruppenarbeit.

Zephram rechnet ganz anders als solche Hotels. Für eine Standard-Ideenfabrik benötigen wir ungefähr 10 qm pro Person. Erst bei dieser Raumgröße haben wir genug Platz, um die verschiedenen Arbeitsbereiche unterzubringen und gleichzeitig das notwendige Raumgefühl zu bewahren. Allein eine Pinnwand, die beidseitig verwendet wird, braucht schon mehr als 5 qm, und in einer ergiebigen Ideenfabrik produziert jeder Teilnehmer genug Rohideen, um eine Pinnwandseite zu füllen. Die Forderung nach 10 qm pro Person löst staunen und bisweilen auch Widerstand bei den Hotels aus, ist aber dennoch unserer Meinung nach für eine gutes Arbeitsergebnis unentbehrlich.

P.S. Am besten geht man natürlich gar nicht erst in ein Hotel, weil diese fast ausnahmslos eine sterile und monotone Stimmung ausbreiten. Lieber wählen wir ungewöhnliche Orte mit Charakter wie beispielsweise ein Fußballstadion, eine alte Festung oder ein Festzelt. Darüber haben wir hier schon berichtet.

Robert Cooper und Scott Edgett (die für den Stage-Gate-Prozess bekannt sind) haben 18 Methoden zur Gewinnung von Produktideen verglichen. Ihr Artikel zeigt die Ergebnisse einer Umfrage unter 160 Unternehmen und heißt “Ideation for Product Innovation: What are the best methods?“.

Dieser Bericht wirft einige interessante Fragen auf; für mich am Wichtigsten waren aber die Erkentnisse zu externen Ideenquellen.

Die Öffentlichkeit um Ideen zu bitten ist zur Zeit eines der Modethemen in Innovationskreisen. Solches Crowdsourcing wird von einigen als Heiliger Gral der Ideengenerierung gesehen: man erhält Tausende von Ideen von einer diversen Gruppe von Menschen praktisch zum Nulltarif. Dies wird oft – aber dennoch fälschlicherweise – als “Open Innovation” bezeichnet. (Tatsächlich ist Open Innovation ein viel breiteres und tieferes Konzept.)

Cooper und Edgett zeigen im Artikel, dass die beiden Methoden dieser Art (die sie “External submission of ideas” bzw. “External idea contest” nennen) die geringste Wirksamkeit aller untersuchten Methoden aufweisen. (Sie waren übrigens auch die am wenigsten beliebten Methoden.)

Ich glaube, dass jeder, der sich professionell mit der Ideengenerierung für Unternehmen beschäftigt, versteht, weshalb derartige externe Ansätze keine erfolgreichen Innovationswerkzeuge sein können. Cooper und Edgett haben nun einen empirischen Beleg hierfür geliefert, und ich erwarte, dass weitere Untersuchungen diesen Befund bestätigen werden.

(Eigene Graphik. Daten übernommen aus R. Cooper und S. Edgett: Ideation for Product Innovation: What are the best methods?)

Tim Kastelle writes a blog on innovation called Innovation Leadership Network. In a recent article called Filtering, Crowdsourcing and Innovation he discusses crowdsourcing for innovation. There he states that one of the conditions for success is that you must ask a question.

None of the crowdsourcing portals in the Internet that I know do this. Instead, they simply say, “Citizens of world, send us your ideas!” I agree with Tim that this is not a promising approach, and the many failed initiatives that are out there confirm this; they receive thousands of ideas, of which only a very small number – if any – are good enough to be implemented.

Tim’s article raises an interesting question for companies using idea portals, namely: “What question should we ask?” As anyone who facilitates ideation workshops knows, the more precise the question, the better the answers will be.

Some simple questions would be

• How could we improve our product?
• How could we improve your customer experience?

These are simply re-formulations of the information the company is interested in. Because they are so generic, they will not provide much better ideas than no question at all.

More interesting questions would be

• What annoys you about our product?
• What was the most unusual situation in which you used our product?
• When don’t you use our product, although we might have expected you to?

These questions are still fairly standard, but should nevertheless yield some interesting leads for innovation.

Most ideation techniques use a change of perspective:

• What could we do that would make our product the only viable alternative for you?
• If you became CEO of our company, what would you change first?
• How would a multi-millionaire improve our product?
• What do you think our product will be like 10 years from now?
• We have a top-secret innovation plan hidden in our vault which will revolutionize our product. We are offering a prize if you can guess what it is!

Questions like these should inspire the creative (and therefore most valuable) visitors to the portal. The result will be a smaller number of higher-quality ideas.

If you were a company with an Internet-based idea portal, what questions would you ask?

One of the currently most fashionable topics in innovation is companies using the internet to ask customers for ideas. This seems to a reasonable thing to do, since it is clear that any innovation can only be successful if it is accepted by customers. Therefore – so the argument – it makes sense to ask customers for ideas for products and services. Indeed, there are now many examples of this concept to be found on the internet. However, there is also an opposing view which states that asking customers for ideas is ineffective. This has led to what I call the “Ask-The-Customer” Paradox: Should we or should we not ask customers for their ideas? In the following, I will refer to those who answer “yes” as the AYEs and those who answer “no” as the NAYs.

The AYEs currently hold the fashionable position – a large part of the innovation-related blogosphere and the printed media coverage of innovation are devoted to discussing what is now almost ubiquitously, but nevertheless erroneously, termed “Open Innovation”. (This is, in fact, a hijacking of Henry Chesbrough’s much broader and more ambitious original concept of Open Innovation). The AYE position receives a lot of support from aficionados of social media, who see internet-based customer idea portals as a good example of the usefulness of Web 2.0. Many companies have already embraced the concept and created portals that solicit ideas from the general public. One of the best-known examples of these is My Starbucks Idea. Two quotes that could represent the motto of the AYE position could be Nobel prize winner Linus Pauling’s “The best way to get a good idea is to get a lot of ideas” and Bill Gates’ “Every day we’re saying, ‘How can we keep this customer happy?’”

The premise of the NAYs is that customers often do not know what products they want and that it therefore doesn’t make any sense to ask them for ideas. This position is based on claims that customers have no knowledge of technological possibilities and that they cannot name problems they are not aware that they have. Instead, proponents of the NAY position such as Clayton Christensen (of disruptive innovation fame) and Anthony Ulwick of Strategyn recommend finding out what the customer is trying to achieve (the so-called “job to be done”). Two quotes that could represent the motto of the NAY position could be Henry Ford’s statement “If I had asked customers what they needed, they would have told me, ‘better horses’” and “Nobody knew that their car had standard transmission until one day the neighbours came home with an automatic.”

The resolution of this apparent paradox is actually quite simple: It lies in recognising the difference between tasks and solutions. As Theodore Levitt famously said, “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill – they want a quarter-inch hole.” Making a hole in the wall is the task the customer wants to get done, a drill is one solution for that task. (Going one step further, people don’t want to make quarter-inch holes either, they want to hang objects on the wall.) When the AYEs ask customers for ideas, what they receive are suggestions for solutions (“I want a drill that works in both concrete and plaster“); on the other hand, when the NAYs are asking customers about the tasks they wish to carry out, they are looking for opportunities (“I want to hang a picture on the wall with a minimum of effort and mess“). The important point here is that the company can now use its expertise to find innovative ways to help the customer achieve their goal which may be completely different to existing solutions (such as an adhesive, a sucker pad or a magnet).

In conclusion, customer idea portals  as they are currently popularly advocated will produce limited results; they will only provide suggestions for solutions that are apparent to customers, given their level of expertise and self-knowledge. They can lead to incremental improvements, which are good for maintaining customer loyalty and short-term competitiveness, as well as for public relations. Ideas for radical innovations, on the other hand, cannot be suggested by customers, but have to be elicited from analysing what customers want to achieve. One rather obvious consequence of this analysis is that companies interested in radical innovations should perhaps set up internet portals that do not ask the public for their ideas, but about the jobs they are trying to do. I don’t know how that could be implemented, but I am sure that, if successful, the feedback obtained from such an instrument would be invaluable for creating innovative new products.

Forbes.com published a piece this week by Jez Frampton titled Crowdsourcing: Is There Wisdom in a Mob?. In the article, Frampton discusses the crowdsourcing of ideas as part of a business model. In particular, he postulates that …

“From the perspective of the brand owner, ideas, in their broadest terms, are becoming a commodity.”

This is an interesting perspective on ideas which I had not heard before. However, I believe the perspective is flawed, as I explained in the comment that I posted:

There is certainly no wisdom to be found in crowds! Shakespeare showed that in Julius Caesar back in 1599.

The claim that ideas are a commodity is provocative, but does no hold up. After all, the definition of a commodity is that different offers are indistinguishable from each other (that is why you can buy them at a commodities exchange.) I do not believe that one idea is indistinguishable from another in the way that one ton of pork bellies is indistinguishable from another.

I think it would be more accurate to say that ideas can be mass-produced, which was not the case before the internet.

As with anything else in life, you get what you pay for, and if you are not paying much for ideas, you shouldn’t be surprised at the quality of the ideas you receive. Just take a look at “top” results at any of the idea platforms out there and you will see what I mean.

Crowdsourcing is the latest fad in the innovation industry, and many companies are setting up internet portals for collecting ideas from the public. This is often, but erroneously, referred to as Open Innovation. As one commenter on the Forbes.com site pointed out, crowdsourcing generates the new problem of finding the needle (the good idea) in a haystack. Unfortunately, while everyone knows what a needle looks like, it is far less clear how to quickly recognise a good idea when it is surrounded by hundreds of other ideas.

During a presentation on innovation management recently, I was discussing the fact that disruption does not only affect the disrupted industry, but the disrupting organisation as well. When a new offer obeys radically different rules, the environment needed to create it successfully must often conform to a new set of rules as well. Skunkworks and spinoffs are two well-known solutions to this problem.

The text on my slide which summarised this discussion read:

Innovation is becoming increasingly disruptive – not only for the disruptees, but also for the disruptors themselves. Organisations may no longer discard a good idea with the argument, “This idea does not fit us.” Instead, they must ask, “How can we fit ourselves to this idea?“

Looking over the slide once again, I think it makes the point quite neatly.