Problem solving or opportunity seeking? Which one for better business results?
Solving a problem restores zest and life to some process which is having hiccups.It is necessary for the process to be restored to the original course. Of course, the original course was an 'opportunity' seen as such by someone,sometime.You need to restore that. However, someone also needs to create new opportunities. In due time, the new opportunity too will develop hiccups, for which problem solving measures will become necessary.
Treating a patient is important. So is giving birth. Merely treating patients will wipe out the world. Some day, every patient has to die however good the treatment.

Using case studies of successful innovators/leaders to establish best practices

There is a trend to document the cases of successful innovators/leaders and distil best practices of innovation/leadership from the way ‘they’ did it. This is the wrong approach because it documents only those few who did something and succeeded but doesn’t take into account those many that did the same thing and went bust.
Nassim Talib, in his book ‘Fooled by Randomness’ calls such successful people ‘lucky fools’. He defines ‘lucky fools’ as ‘persons who benefited from a disproportionate share of luck but attribute their success to some other, generally very precise, reason.’
In logic, this error is known as post hoc ergo propter hoc i.e. after this, therefore due to this. This can also be called ‘after the fact reasoning’ - whatever precedes the other thing is considered to be its cause. The causality is erroneous and usually gets established only because it suits your purpose. That is rationalization, not reasoning.
Stories about how your Aunt Mary's cancer was cured by watching Marx Brothers’ movies or taking a liver extract from castrated chickens are meaningless. The cancer might have gone into remission on its own, which some cancers do; or it might have been misdiagnosed; or, or, or.… What we need are controlled experiments, not anecdotes. (all in italics taken from Michael Shermer’s book "Why People Believe Weird Things" )
In the leadership field, the fallacy of ideal leadership traits/practices has been laid to rest by the theory of situational leadership. Only that practice is considered right which meets the specific demands of that situation and that group. I suspect the same should apply to innovation too.
Instead of establishing best practices from a study of a few successful people, how about simply installing good think-skills in the innovator/leader?
Back to basics, eh! A little more demanding than copying from case studies but then, it works.

Innovation for the SME Sector

On 6th August, I got an opportunity to address the delegates of the SME Conclave 2009 at the Taj Land’s End, Bandra. I spoke to them on ‘Innovation for the SME Sector’. Just a few days back, I had also interacted with the SME Chamber of India, Chakala, Andheri.

Speaking to several SMEs, I was surprised to find the relatively big players quite uninterested in innovation while the startups were very enthusiastic about it. Frankly, I had expected the reverse. My confusion cleared when, by sheer coincidence, I read a small piece on Prospect Theory by Jeffrey Baumgartner on Innovation Tools, that evening. Prospect theory (Daniel Kahneman & Amos Tversky,1979) clarifies that people are highly risk averse when it comes to potentially increasing their wealth, but risk seeking when dealing with potential economic loss.

So, this was what was happening.

The established SMEs were getting good ROI and were looking to increase their wealth. That made them risk averse and distrust innovation. Why rock a boat that is sailing well enough? On the other hand, the startups were in a phase in which they were only incurring expenditure with no or little income. They were dealing with potential economic loss and hence welcomed suggestions that could change the situation. For them, all change was change for the better.

Innovation does trigger a change in status quo. How much you welcome innovation depends on whether the status quo seemed attractive to you or not.

Of course, whether the status quo would remain as attractive without ‘running twice as hard just to stay in place’ is another matter.

Do Mumbai Terror ( 26/11 ) and Disruptive Innovation have anything in common? A lot.Tactics used by the terrorists provide a good example of disruptive innovation.
One of the planks of disruptive innovation is that improving the features of your product or service is not the only way to satisfy customers. Many a time, reducing them works as well.Adding complexity and efficiency is not the only way to innovate. Many a time, a low cost option works even better.
Insurgency and terrorism itself are ways of tackling your enemy by the 'low resources' route. While navies talk of submarines, destroyer ships and sea control strategies to counter enemy ships, the enemy slips his guys through low quality trawlers, right through the radars and sonars of the navy and cost guard.
Give the devil his due. They did a good job through disruptive innovation. They didn't fight the navy, they simply fooled them. Don't hit them where they are. Hit them where they ain't.

Indian Mindskills

DIVERSITY
THE KEY TO CREATIVITY AND INNOVATION

By now, you would certainly have heard of words like divergence and diffusion in the same breath with creativity and innovation. If not, you have been listening to the wrong people.

What is the role of diversity in creativity?

There are three types of creativity. The child’s creativity is largely representational. The scientist’s is abstractive and inferential. The designer’s creativity is primarily elaborative. Here we are talking of elaborative creativity.

It is primarily a combinatorial process. Consider a pressure cooker full of various ingredients for a good meal, on fire. The various contents in it mesh with one another and produce something new. Addition of a new vegetable or a spice can completely change the resulting dish.

Generativity theory of creativity holds that ideas, thoughts and actions are in constant competition in our nervous systems. One outcome of this dynamic process is a steady stream of new thoughts. By changing the number and type of thoughts that compete, we can accelerate the creative flow and direct it in desired ways. The combinatorial process is predictable and orderly.

Think of a kaleidoscope – that little tube containing pieces of broken bangles and having lenses on both ends. You look from the viewing end and see a beautiful mosaic pattern at the other. Rotate it even slightly and the bangle pieces rearrange themselves instantly. You get a totally different outcome. Add another piece of bangle to the collection and the pattern changes again. Each time, it is different .

It seems that the trick lies in introducing new pieces of broken bangles at regular intervals and then rotating the kaleidoscope. But, do we do that with our lives?

Our ‘ordered and srtuctured' lifestyle allows us very few opportunities to introduce new elements in the kaleidoscope. I always wear light colour shirts and sober colour trousers, take the colony bus to the railway station, take the 7.43 train to town, hang out with retired army officers and read only the Indian Express newspaper. My eating habits are so orderly that the waiter doesn’t even bring the menu. He brings the meals directly. In such a scenario, where will new elements come from? If some day I get adventurous and wear a bright T-shirt with faded jeans, maybe some pretty young thing will strike up a conversation with me. I surely won’t have to hang around with retired army officers any more! Maybe a young pianist feels comfortable to strike up an acquaintance with me. Maybe he talks to me about symphonies and musical notations and I see some way I can use that concept in my training programs.
If I take another bus to the station, take the 7.53 train instead of the usual 7.43 one and read the Midday newspaper instead of the Indian Express, I increase the chances manifold to introduce new elements in my life. Change the input ; change the output.

When was the last time you did something for the first time?

If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.

Do not underestimate the power of miniscule quantities of new inputs to bring about major changes in the process. A spoonful of lime juice is enough to curdle all the milk.

More and more, innovation is springing not from particular industries or disciplines, but rather across them, says Frans Johansson, author of The Medici Effect: Breakthrough Insights at the Intersection of Ideas, Concepts & Cultures. "When you step into an intersection of fields, disciplines, or cultures, you can combine existing concepts into a large number of extraordinary new ideas."

To bring you a new idea, whose wisdom do you bank upon? The departmental head and his 5 subordinates? IBM have recently undertaken an open innovation event or Innovation Jam as they call to collect ideas from some 100,000 minds, including employees, consultants, employees families and 67 clients from the Bank of America to Massachusetts Institute of Technology. By tapping into the wisdom of crowds, IBM are looking to transform industries, alter human behaviour, and ultimately lead IBM to new business. ( http://imaginatikresearch.blogspot.com - entry 22 Aug 2006). We are seeing more and more companies embracing open innovation strategies to engage people through their various partnership networks, from employees families, retirees, clients, and suppliers to name but a few.

Give yourself a chance. De-pattern your mind. Get new perspectives. Limited perspectives limit the way you view the world. If all that you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.

In addition to opening yourself up to new experiences, you can consciously pick up a concept at random and graft it to yours and see what comes out. Techniques are today available for it.

If I, who for 26 years lifted my left foot only when they barked 'LEFT', can talk of creativity, any one can. This is the era of technique and tool based creativity.

The opening bait on innovation

We are living in exciting times. Recently, Gary Hamel was in town (Mumbai, India) and evangelized on innovation. It is well known that the age of Quality (the Six Sigma era) is effectively over now. Quality is now the tool of survival, not differentiation. Creativity and innovation are the only differentiating factors today.

As a creativity facilitator, I have noticed several misconceptions on these topics. In this mail, I shall cover some basics and then build up gradually.
First and foremost, both these terms are taken as synonyms, which is incorrect. Creativity is the creation of the million dollar idea, while innovation refers to the process by which the million dollar idea actually get converted to a million dollars. As you would have noticed, creativity is mostly in the minds of individuals and is a cognitive matter. Innovation, on the other hand, is mostly an organisational process, a means to ‘manage the creativity’.

Some more modern findings of these topics are as follows-
Today, creativity is a learnable and teachable subject. And the encouraging news is that creativity is not hampered by the demands of discipline. Since it is a technique based approach, discipline actually helps. Those who follow laid down directions, do better at creativity than those who take an intuitive approach.
It is also established that the problem is not really of lack of ideas with employees. Most of them are bursting with ideas. Organizations are just unable to tap into them. What we need is an effective idea management system.
Creativity and innovation is no longer restricted to development of products. Innovation is now spreading to all areas of business – marketing, HR, operations, finance, brand management, channel management etc. To clarify this, Professors Mohanbir Sawhney, Robert C. Wolcott and Inigo Arroniz in the MIT Sloan Management Review (Spring 2006) introduce their Innovation Radar. The radar features four major dimensions that serve as business anchors:
i. Offerings a company creates (WHAT).
ii. Customers it serves (WHO).
iii. Processes it employs (HOW).
iv. Points of Presence it uses to take its offerings to market (WHERE).


Alok Asthana
www.mind-skills.com
alokasthana@yahoo.com
91-22-25308265, 91-9821677859