Innovation DNA: It's all about the Culture

Dear Reader,

In this edition of my blog I’d like to talk about what I call “Innovation DNA”. Just as DNA is what defines and creates a unique signature for each of us, your organization's innovation DNA is what defines innovation for you and creates its unique signature. 

Let me ask you a question: Which company is the most innovative? What differentiates that company from other companies? I am sure a majority of you would say that it’s the company’s culture.

While what I define as “Innovation DNA” has more parts to it, culture has a big part in shaping the unique signature for innovation in your organization. 

But, what is Culture? 

Can we say it is what value system is upheld? Can we say it is what causes certain actions? Can we say it is what prevents other actions? As ethereal as it is, culture is the fluid, dynamic binding force that allows a group of people to work towards a common vision, goals, aspirations, values, actions, in-actions, etc. In my view, it is the most important glue for any organization. Culture is also a legacy of our predecessors and is a legacy we all leave by way of our choices.

In my dictionary, Culture always begins with P(eople). I read a very interesting article on this topic which I’d like to quote: 

“In my opinion, Gibson, now CEO at Paradigm, put his finger firmly on the issue at hand. “I’ve fired nearly everyone, rehired and had exactly the same company,” he said. "In other words, fostering innovation is about the way you do business as much as who does your business for you. Recreate the same uncreative processes and you’ll have the same uncreative business.” 

Another article makes the pithy assessment that “culture eats strategy for lunch.”

What is the culture of innovation? This topic is indeed a complex area to understand or write about. I have read many articles in which experts have tried to boil it down to 5 - 10 must-do things to build a culture of innovation.  

I further simplify it to three most important things to focus on are

•             Empowerment

•             Transparency

•             Advocacy

Innovation is all about disrupting effectively. To this end, “empowerment” encapsulates courage, trust and acceptance. 

• Courage: Have the courage to do the right thing, even if it means short-term failure. Failure is part of the game. Trust that people around you will do the right thing. Accept other’s failures as much as you accept your own.
• Transparency: is all about sharing. Share your views prolifically. You never know where you may ignite the spark of creative thinking. Have a mechanism to associate good ideas where ever they may originate without getting caught in the "not-invented-here" syndrome. Be generous in acknowledging the good ideas around you and champion your fellow innovators. Great ideas are often built upon many good ideas.
• Advocacy: means sponsorship, recognition and reward. Even the greatest idea needs its Godfather. Sponsorship provides the wind beneath the wings of an idea. It takes an idea from a seed to an actual fruitful outcome (no pun intended!). Recognition and reward build the right incentives for creative people to keep doing what they do best instead of getting bogged down by the hum-drum.

When ideas start out they are nascent and vulnerable, and the ideator is fuzzy and in-articulate. Your environment needs to instill courage in both the ideators and their beneficiaries so that they do not force an untimely death to what could prove out to be the next big thing. At the same time, when there is lack of proof in achieving the intended goal after unsuccessful attempts, ideas have to be let go without fear of retribution or shame. Organizations that successfully master the art of this balance are more likely to succeed in their innovation goals.

In my organization, we have focused on these three aspects to ensure that every person has a "right to creativity" and their voice does not get shutdown due to hierarchy or so-called "expertize". We have also invested in building platforms that democratize sharing of creative opinions and ideas, gamify the experience to reward right behaviors and bring advocates to sponsor ideas with merit. This has helped us accelerate our innovation culture.

To bring it all back, if Innovation DNA is the wheel, culture is the hub for all the spokes. 

An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.

An investment in knowledge pays the best interest. ~ Benjamin Franklin 

It was a major neuron-fest (in my head) as I was attended the Ideas Economy Conference (sponsored by The Economist)  on June 7/8^th, 2011, in Santa Clara, California. The conference was two days of unbridled conversations on topics pertaining to “Intelligence in the Information Age”, a.k.a. Big Data and Knowledge Management. Let me give you some numerical facts regarding these 2 days:  there were 39 sessions, 5 moderators, 62 speakers (including panelists), an in-room audience of ~ 250, and an online viewership of ~ 300.

The conference was publicized as “The Economist will bring together theorists, strategists, and innovators who understand how to harness data to create value and advance individual, corporate, and social good.”

It was a well thought-out and meticulously planned event with speakers and panelists ranging from some of the top leaders in the information industry, research, and medicine, to government officials and policy makers. It was not very hard to see that everyone present had one common thread of interest, which was how to manage and cope with data in this new era where information is produced faster than it can be consumed. 

Below is my simplified  journalist’s view of the conference… 

Never before in the history of human civilization has the sharing of knowledge been so fast and effortless. For instance, today I have created 5 Facebook updates, posted a blog on IWE, IM’d with friends and family around the world, created a couple of presentations, written an article, and sent a couple dozen emails – all in a matter of few hours. With each activity, I was sharing data at a never before seen pace and reach. I am just one of an ecosystem of billions of fellow humans that creates an enormous amount of data on a daily basis – ranging from inconsequential updates to knowledge nuggets that can educate others and everything in between. Just another curve ball in this whole situation is that data is no longer just text-based; it can be video, audio, images, etc.  With modern technology, any person can share data with anyone and everyone across the globe in an instant. This has made the world a bit more flat and small. But, you already knew that!

With an average of 140 million tweets/day and 30 billion pieces of content shared each month on Facebook, information has become more dynamic than ever before.  Data exists in many forms such as structured and un-structured, public and private, big and small. It can come from social, corporate, private, or public forums. Data does not stay constant, it evolves through participation from multiple sources and not all of these sources are human either.  Regardless of where data originates, it eventually interacts with other pieces of data from other realms to create a bigger potential for information, knowledge, intelligence, or wisdom.

Now, with the help of algorithmic inferences and other big data management technologies, large volumes of data can be crunched and analyzed very quickly. For example, petabytes of data originating from particle detectors in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN’s Higgs Boson experiment are analyzed at 40 million inputs/second. Data can be used to gain new insights that the world has not seen before in the fields of genealogy, medicine, physics, urban planning, etc. Whether it is to create prediction models for epidemics or having Dr. Watson, from IBM’s research lab, play Jeopardy to beat the human player, the potential to derive intelligence from data is huge and not yet fully tapped. 

A really good example is the Aadhaar project in India. This project was kicked off by the Indian government to tag each citizen with an Aadhaar number (much like Social Security) that will ensure proper identification of the individual. The basis for this number will be a biometric identification mechanism that gives everyone a unique identification number much like RFID. The ability to accurately map this data (for 1.21 billion people) to derive useful information will provide never before seen ways of providing social benefits, understanding census data to design welfare and education programs, and national security.  

Big data has opened doors for as many possibilities as it has for bigger issues and concerns. Information in the world of big data takes on concerns beyond manageability, such as security, access, privacy, profiling, share-ability, monetize-ability, timeliness, and accuracy (just in time).  In a nutshell, all of those present at the conference were as concerned about “Big Brother” knowing too much as they were about they themselves not knowing enough.  Questions like “How much or how little should the Government know about you?”, “How much information is too much on social networks?”, and “Should an individual have access to their own medical history?” were just some of the topics of discussion. Conspiracy theorists imagined that this data deluge is preparing us for the “black swan effect”, where new intelligence will eventually replace humans (akin to the rise of machines in a sci-fi movie).  Are we going towards Nirvana or raising a “Frankenstein”? Only time will tell…but no one disagreed that the power is in the hands of people who understand how to use data and data management technology.

Now, let’s bring this back to the corporate context:  How does a company take advantage of one of the biggest untapped assets it has, i.e. data? Data does not just make a smarter company but it can also present newer ways to create value for your customers and shareholders.  For all of this to happen, we need to enable foundational architectural changes to extract and flow, aggregate and interplay data to create useful insights. We need to enable intelligence architectures and technologies to augment what humans can know and do. We also need to design data governance to enable purposeful access to data and intelligence.We cannot take advantage of tomorrow’s opportunities with yesterday’s architecture. And, tomorrow’s architecture is incomplete if it does not understand how to deal with BIG DATA.

 Ajay Prasad, Former Secretary, Ministry of Defense & Civil Aviation, Government of India (next to me), Gavin Newsom, Lt Governor California (center), at the Idea Economy Conference

If you are interested in this topic, here are some additional references for you to check:

The Idea Economy: http://ideas.economist.com/videos

Books:  “The Shallows” by Nicolas Carr

               “The Journey of Man – A Genetic Odyssey” {Discerning patterns in BIG data sets}

Wolfgram Alpha:  http://www.wolframalpha.com/

IBM Watson:  http://www-03.ibm.com/innovation/us/watson/index.html

Metamarkets:  http://www.metamarketsgroup.com/platform/

Yandex:  http://about.yandex.com/

Greenplum:  http://www.greenplum.com/

Tableau:  http://www.tableausoftware.com/

Urban Mapping:  http://www.urbanmapping.com/

Cloudera:  http://www.cloudera.com/

Innovation – What is it about?

"Innovation" in today's business world has become a buzzword and one that is used indiscriminately. So, let’s talk about Innovation. Is Innovation an Innovation in itself?  Is it the new "old"? 

Innovation is as old as human civilization, so much so that it is an integral part of human evolution. “From sticks and stones, to spears to industrial revolution” and “from stones, to matchsticks, to nuclear generated fuel” - Innovation is part of human DNA. The need for innovation is very basic. We want to better our lives, do things with more ease, accomplish more with less. It starts from being creative and having an urge to change for the better. It is interesting to note how innovation is built into vision statements for every part of a company. 

Hence, applied to business context, Innovation creates differentiation, market value and customer loyalty. Innovation can help transform and disrupt existing markets or create new ones. Innovation is perhaps one of the most important tools to ensure success and market relevancy of a business. So, what is Innovation? Is it the same as invention? 

For our purpose, we can settle with the definition that “Innovation is an idea applied successfully in practice”. "Successfully in practice" is the key differentiation for an invention to be called an Innovation.

As Wikipedia explains “For innovation to occur, something more than the generation of a creative idea or insight is required: the insight must be put into action to make a genuine difference, resulting for example in new or altered business processes within our organization, or changes in the products and services provided.”

Hence, there are three important concepts in innovation – ideation, evaluation and commercialization. Ideation is the act of collecting and evolving ideas -  the creativity pool.  Evaluation is the act of prioritization- the viability assessment. Commercialization is the act of realization - the industrialization (we will explore each of these in upcoming blogs). 

Idea is the seed which starts an innovation’s life cycle. A good idea may happen by chance but harvesting good ideas to create success comes from a method – a method to manage innovation. Statistics support that companies that innovate successfully do so using an efficient and repeatable methodology. 

There is more than one method to manage innovation. Irrespective of which method you use, it has to be repeatable and dependable. (watch for my next write-up where i will explore further)