There is little doubt that the smart companies are rapidly adopting the view that innovation is powered by connectedness and collaboration. But what is real collaboration? And indeed, how do we put it into effect?  The Gen C worker understands this – Facebook and social media delivers effective outcome for them, and this is their world. But what about in the enterprise?

Excellent report published by CLC Human Resources on the intersection of collaboration and social media. Some of the findings include:

1. Improving the connections across the workforce continues to be a top priority for organisations.
2. Organizations are ineffective at driving collaboration.
3. Effective collaboration remains an elusive goal for many organisations.
4. To improve their effectiveness at collaboration, organizations are turning to social media tools
5. The best organizations focus on four key components of social media–enabled collaboration
6. While an inFrastructure platform must exist, by itself it is not a differentiator of social media–enabled collaboration effectiveness.
7. Focus, Filter, and Facilitate are all important for improving collaboration over social media
8. Organizations can increase collaboration effectiveness by up to 25% by directing social media toward business objectives and the relevant collaborative tools
9. Organizations invest in social media to capitalize upon its strengths to improve their collaboration capabilities across the collaboration requirements
10. Most organizations are united in their aspiration for social media to enable the production of the most value for and from the most employees
11. Organizations invest in social media to capitalize upon its strengths to improve their collaboration capabilities across the collaboration requirements
12. Organizations recognize that poor management of social media platforms is a significant impediment to the success of collaboration via those platforms
13. Regardless of the model used to manage the platform, organizations should make sure it adheres to three key principles to ensure effective collaboration

Why would I not want to be like Steve?

Booz&Co have released an interesting paper. It talks about Job’s complex leadership style. His autocratic nature. And his love and hate of employees. I had a friend who worked for Apple who told me that you would never want to meet Steve in the lift. He would ask what you were doing in Apple, and the conversation would go one of two ways. If he was not happy with your response, you might get fired on the spot. If he was happy he might overload you with a whole new project on top of what you were currently doing.

So the view was: never get into a lift with Steve.

Read the Booz&Co article. An interesting perspective on Steve. But one wonders how Apple will survive without him…….

But look at what Maddock and Viton are saying:

 The Victims
“Can you believe what they want us to do now? And of course we have no time to do it. I don’t get paid enough for this. The boss is clueless.”. Their view is that the victims are so destructive that they pull down the innovation capability of the entire team

The Nonbelievers
“Why should we work so hard on this? Even if we come up with a good idea, the boss will probably kill it. If she doesn’t, the market will. I’ve seen this a hundred times before.”

The Know-It-Alls
“You people obviously don’t understand the business we are in. The regulations will not allow an idea like this, and our stakeholders won’t embrace it. Don’t even get me started on our IT infrastructure’s inability to support it. And then there is the problem of ….”

The view: You don’t want the victims, nonbelievers, or know-it-alls. It is up to you to make sure they take their anti-innovative outlooks elsewhere.

It’s a challenge for sure. Changing culture is very difficult and take a lot of time. Certainly the preference should be on change management – and one hopes that if you are successful in chaining the masses, then the nonbelievers, the victims and the know-it-alls will leave – they no longer fit in.

Would be interested to understand if the firing method works…..or not.

And then they get stuck. And sit there. And eventually die.

Why? Here are a few reasons:

a)    The Business Units don’t want to pick up ideas unless they can be guaranteed an ROI. This is very common. The CEO is demanding growth and resources are scarce – why should a business unit deviate from its core capability to try something new – and find that the output now decreases? Why take the risk?  Better to get on with the job they are paid to do.

b)   No one is empowered to make a decision. Yes, everyone agrees the ideas that have been chosen are really game-changing. However no one is willing to put up his or her hand to allocate funding to drive that idea forward. Comments like “We should really work on these ideas” and “It would be great if we could get these ideas off the ground” abound. Six months later, the ideas have not progressed – at all. Some people talk about them, most have forgotten them.

c)    There is no process to spin-out an idea. While people talk about spin-outs, there is not actual process to make this real. So in theory it could happen – in practice there is no hope.

d)   There is no apparent “owner” of the idea. Of course, disruptive ideas will often have no apparent and obvious owner. Why? Because they are different and disruptive! So there is no owner – and hence the cry of “Why don’t you speak to …..they might like the idea” is heard throughout the halls of the organisation.

e)    The CEO never gets to hear about the idea, and the hierarchy kills it. By the time the approval process of the idea pushed the idea through several layers, it is probably dead, or dying. Someone along the way will kill it – or at least cripple it so much that everyone else is paralyzed. The strange thing is that if, and it is a big if, the CEO were to hear of the idea, chances are he or she would say “Great idea. Let’s do it!” . But it will never get that far (the CEO is obviously far too busy and it is impossible to get in their calendar) so the idea just languishes.  And dies.

f)     There is no Idea to Execution process. People think there is . but there isn’t. Very often you will hear “If we get good ideas coming through, of course we will fund them”. And when a set of ideas does in fact emerge, everyone ducks for cover. We are too busy, we need to wait till next financial year, we have no staff to allocate to work on the idea, the business plan is not well-enough developed……. Sound familiar?

So, what to do? Every organisation focused on innovation needs a well thought-through Idea to Execution strategy – not just a document, but a strategy that every stakeholder involved has committed to see executed. Without such commitment collecting and filtering ideas is almost a waste of time in itself. We need to really focus now on the incubation and execution phases of idea-to-Execution. For a long time the focus has been on collecting the ideas – now take some time out and ask yourself – do we really have a well developed Idea-to-Execution strategy end to end? One that works? One that is transparent and clear to all of the staff?

If the answer is “no”or “I am not sure” then take time out to shore up the back-end execution phases of innovation – because thats where the value really lies for you organisation.

As the saying goes, ideas with execution are just dreams.

What is the elevator pitch on what you’ve been doing since you were named Chief Technology Officer of the United States?

“What I do is advance the president’s innovation agenda by incorporating his bottom-up theory of change. To be very specific about it, I execute the president’s innovation strategy in a manner that taps into the expertise of the American people to solve big problems.”

Remind yourself that this is the CTO talking……..

or how about:

As an advisor, what buttons are available for you to push?

“We have four policy levers that reflect our open innovation philosophy. We’re opening up data for innovators and entrepreneurs. We’re taking on the role of impatient convener. We’re initiating prizes, challenges, and competitions. And we’re attracting top talent at the intersection of technology and policy.”

or this for example:

The White House’s Open Government Initiative focuses on three areas: transparency, participation, and collaboration. Can you rate the progress that has been made on each thus far?

“I’m the wrong person to grade them, but I will rank them. That might be safer. We’ve seen great results in transparency, and we have absolutely delivered. It’s never enough, for sure, but I’m very pleased with our experience opening up data. We’ve seen wide-spread adoption of publishing data [in the executive branch]. I’m, ah, excited about the prospects of collaboration, because so much of the open innovation story is built on collaboration and the idea that to solve the big challenges of our time, we’re going to have to tap into the expertise of the American people. In the markets where we’ve focused, we’ve seen results — they just haven’t scaled across government. And on participation, the arrow is trending up. There were a lot of regulatory and administrative burdens that made it very hard to take advantage of social media and other techniques, but we’ve spent the last year and a half minimizing the barriers.”

What is astounding is to hear a CTO of the United States talk so freely about openness, collaboration, transparency, innovation and connectedness rather than putting the emphasis on technology. It is almost a given that these issues are on the table for the WHite House, and that technology underpins the solution. Would the conversations have gone this way some 5 years ago? I think not.

Very inspiring!

This video aired at the Ideas Economy: Innovation 2012 event in Berkeley, California on March 28th 2012.

• the innovation function,
• innovation strategy and innovation governance (formal mechanisms),
• innovation leadership and innovation culture (informal mechanisms).

The study offers a unique perspective by looking at the differences in behavior of innovation leaders versus laggards across these key areas – allowing to uncover good practices in managing innovation.

Finally, the report offers an overview of the most important implications for innovation executives that seek to improve their innovation success rate. Our study revealed that the absence of a well-articulated innovation strategy is by far the most important constraint for companies to reach their innovation targets, followed by a lack of understanding of the external environment. There is a need for innovation strategy development in a more bottom-up manner, focused on people as the key source of competitive advantage. One needs to capture all those individual insights from managers and employees to better incorporate an understanding of the external environment in the strategy development process.

View the report here.

HP’s latest campaign is an evolution of the Garage and represents a new leap forward. InnoStream is an “organizational stream of consciousness” campaign where employees can submit ideas about anything related to HP software, such as new services and product enhancements.

Employees can collaborate and vote on submissions to indentify top ideas in hopes of winning the popular vote and getting a chance to create a business proposal for the idea’s further development. Development teams will be built around ideas chosen by a review team and will have an opportunity to utilize customers as design partners, and showcase them to a design council for possible funding and implementation. Finalized ideas could become a part of HP’s software portfolio or incorporated in existing products.

InnoStream is also introducing a host of new opportunities for innovation including ‘InnoBlast’, an event where people can present ideas or cool things they have created, and ‘InnoMiles’, a point system where users can win prizes and privileges as they build up to silver, gold, and platinum account status. Top winners with the most InnoMiles will receive ‘InnoStar’ ranking, designated to recognize outstanding contributors. These types of rewards and recognition are the some of the most common ways companies are engaging employees and encouraging participation while maintaining a thriving innovation community.

Watch the video!

Here is a short video with Gary talking about his book.