What are the unique skill sets needed for innovation leadership?  We all have a list of what good leadership skills are but what are the unique ones you need to be a true innovation leader?  Today on Killer Innovations, I will discuss what I have found to be the skills needed for successful innovation leadership.

Innovation Leadership Skills

These leadership skills apply to all organizations, whether you are small organizations or a large organization.

* Integrity

* You need to trust the people you are working with.

* You need to know they are looking out for what is in the best interest for the team and organization.

* Vision and Strategy.

* Team members are looking to the leaders to communicate what the vision and strategy are.

* You need to look longer range beyond where the team is and roll that back in so they can see what your vision is.

* You need to be able to tell the story, make the pitch, share their dream with others.

* Communication is critical to successful innovation leadership,

* If you are going to be a leader you need to be able to interact and build relationships and truly have interests in other people’s lives.

* Know what is going on in your team member’s lives so you can help them eliminate distractions and really get their head in the game.

* You have got to persuade people to leave what they are doing now and join your team.

* You have to be able to convince them that what are doing is something worth their time.

* Adaptability and Flexibility.

* As a leader you cannot be rigid; you have to be adaptable and flexible with your team and organization.

* Can you operate as a leader of a team?

* You need diversity on your team to be successful.

* Coach and Develop.

* Find young and upcoming people and coach and develop them.

* Decision-Making.

* You have to be comfortable making the final decision.

* Realize that sometimes the decision you make are going to fail.

* Planning and Organizing.

* If you are not good at planning and organizing, then hire people to do it for your team.

These are the basic skills you need to be a successful innovation leader.  So, what skills do you need to do differently to truly be an innovation leader?

* Innovation leadership involves taking risks.

* You have to be comfortable that some of the decisions you make are going to fail.

* Some of your decisions are going to be flipped.

* You need to keep looking for new opportunities and threats.

* Look for threats to your organization, industry, or geography.

* Innovation is about change.

* Stability is the death of innovation.

* Foster a culture where change is expected.

* Do not rest on the traditional management techniques.

* Every situation is different.

* You need to invent the way you manage and do leadership.

* Be an optimist.

* Innovation is about being an optimist.

* You need to convince and convey an optimistic view of the future.

* Innovator’s cut through the crap.

* Innovation leaders need to cut through the crap and get to the core.

* You need to step in and stop the corporate game-playing.

We love to say anything can be innovated, anyone can innovate and innovation can happen anywhere.  Silicon Valley and other recognized innovation hubs do not have a lock on innovation or a secret sauce that cannot be modeled or improved on.  It takes a willingness to put time, your resources, explore and expand your creativity (we all have it) beyond where you are today to see the non-obvious.  When you do, you will be like our Kentucky guests, innovating in a non-traditional innovation hub, non-traditional way and a non-high tech innovation.

As part of our Innovation Across America tours, we ventured across the country in our new mobile studio to Paducah, Kentucky.  This tour was looking for those innovating “Beyond the Obvious”. 

In our show this week we had the opportunity to interview the founders of Fin Gourmet Foods.  Started in 2010, Fin Gourmet is a Kentucky Proud Producer™ of wild-caught Asian Carp products.  So why Asian Carp. It has the highest source of healthy clean protein and Omega-3 fatty acids, on par with wild caught salmon.  Nowhere else in the world but the USA are Asian Carp wild-caught, and those from Western KY are of the best quality. More importantly this innovation story is unique.  Fin’s mission and vision are that the Asian Carp provide economic opportunities for the communities, fostering job creation and revitalizing the inland fishing industry. 

Defining and Tackling a Problem Statement

The team at Fin Gourmet defined the problems and challenges and engaged in disruptive ideation.  As an integral part of their innovation process they considered some basic assumptions of innovation to create value including:

Turn other people’s trash into a product: Fin took the Asian Carp, which is an invasive species that is taking over the Mississippi and Ohio river systems, and innovated a way to turn it into a great food source.

Give opportunities to people overlooked: In addition to locating in a rural part of the country, Fin works with local halfway houses to offer jobs to former prison inmates and others down on their luck.  Training, teaching and building a culture that values and leverages the abilities of all.

Breathe life back into an industry overlooked by others: Fin pays a premium price for what many considered “trash” to help local independent fishing families to transition to this new species of fish and the economy it can support.

What is the Non-Obvious Innovation at Fin?

Fin has two patented innovative processing techniques to:

Debone Asian Carp fillets and

Make all-natural surimi (Japanese fish paste) from the Carp without using water or chemicals.

With their innovative model, process and approach Fin Gourmet is making a big impact locally and across the globe with their products and story.  The Fin founders,

I was recently asked to give a talk at TEDx Boulder.  The talk was based on a speech I gave in D.C. a few months past.  Humans have a superpower. That superpower is the ability to convince ourselves that something is true when it is not.  Seventy-five percent of us have convinced ourselves that we are an impostor or fraud when it comes to our jobs and careers.  Psychologists refer to this as the impostor syndrome. The impostor syndrome is questioning our achievements and living with the fear that someone is going to find out that we are not good enough and we are a fraud.  The impostor syndrome struggle does not know anything about career, title, identity, history; it is universal.  So many of us struggle with this, the question is what do you do about it? I am going to give you two plans of action.

Find a comfortable/safe environment to share the secret that is telling you that you are not good enough.

Be an encourager and encourage others on their skills and capabilities.  

I wasted twenty-five years of my career believing the lie that I was not good enough.  So what lie is telling you that you are not good enough and that you are an impostor? Whatever that lie is, the opposite is the truth.  So, what is the truth about you that is amazing?  

Fear of the Impostor Syndrome

As I shared in the speech, impostor syndrome knows no boundaries.  It is not tied to something about us, it is ourselves being hypercritical of ourselves.  The fear of being found out can be paralyzing.  What is fear? Fear is that emotion that comes from feeling threatened, feeling like you are going to get hurt, or abused, it can be the result of being physically impacted or how we will be emotionally impacted.  Fear stands for “false evidence that appears real.” My fear was not conforming to what society said would make me successful.  In the innovation game we will experience the fear of failing, the fear that the idea is not good enough.  What I learned from my experience from feeling fear from impostor syndrome is to test it.  Is it true fear? Or false evidence that appears true? Once you know, put your fear in its proper place.

If you find yourself struggling with impostor syndrome, why don’t you head over to The Innovators Community.  It is a great place to connect and post your own impostor syndrome or send me a private message and I will respond. I’d love to hear from you.  Definitely, find someone to share your impostor syndrome secret.  Thanks for taking the time out of your busy schedule to join us today.  

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To learn more about the impostor syndrome, listen to this week's show: Overcoming Impostor Syndrome to Create that Game-Changing Innovation.

 

To win in the highly competitive markets of today, we need to win in the emerging creative economy. Key to this success is helping our teams re-discover their natural ability to be highly creative. Today's show is the audio from a keynote speech I gave at the Business Alliance Bootcamp for growing companies and entrepreneurs in Washington DC.

Creativity Economy

Knowledge is becoming a commodity.  If you have a job that can be taught at a University, your skill is at risk and your job is at risk.  The impact of this is everywhere.  Think about the transitions from an agricultural to a manufacturing economy to a knowledge economy.  My argument is that the creative economy is here.  What’s the new thing?  The new thing is this creative economy.  In the early 1980s the market value for companies listed on the stock exchanges was concentrated on book value with most company’s stock valued at 95% book value.  Twenty years later 23% is the average book value.  So, in 20 years a major fundamental shift occurred on how companies get valued.  I would argue that one of the key pieces on the increases in that intangible value is the role of creativity and innovation.  It is the value of ideas.  It is no longer what you can do with your hands or with a machine, it is the ability to continually generate new ideas, new products, and new services.  A lot of companies are unable to do this and as a result, do not survive.  Economic stability going forward is the ability to have ideas being continuously generated from the organization.  Innovation is important, but a lot of companies make the mistake of putting all of the pressure for innovation on their Chief Innovation Officer.  Go out and do a survey.  Eighty-six percent of CEO’s admit that innovation is key to their business but less than ten percent have any formal process to innovate within their organization.

Bringing Back Creativity

My strong belief is that creativity is not a gift.  It is not bestowed on people, it is a skill that anybody can learn, practice, and become proficient at.  It ignores age, demographics, education levels, and geography.  It is the ability to put your own thought processes in place, to come up with the next idea, product, or service.  A lot of people are self-pessimistic and are convinced that they do not have it and they are not creative. The fact is that we are creative creatures; we were created to create.  Think about kids and how creative they are with a simple object like a toilet paper roll. The problem is through the process of our education systems and through jobs, we literally beat that creativity out of our people.  How do we bring back that amount of creativity that we see in kids and bring it back to our day to day lives?  We need that ability to take our filters off and see things from an unbiased and different perspective.  I had a conversation with a co-worker many years ago about “old think and new think.”  Old think is when you are coming up with an idea and then you put a filter on it and decide to go safe and go with the old way of doing things.  New think is all about breaking perspectives and getting rid of perspectives that confine and restrict us from coming up with new ideas.  The best ideas will sound stupid.  If you are not coming up with stupid ideas, then try harder!

FIRE and PO

“FIRE” is a very simple method you can apply to come up with ideas.

* “F” in the acronym “FIRE” stands for focus.

Laws of Innovation

Why do some organizations have better innovation than others?  Over the years I have collected what I call the “7 Immutable Laws of Innovation.”  No single organization could be successful in all of these laws but there are always opportunities to improve.  Let’s get started with the laws of Innovation.

 

* Law of Leadership.

* Leadership sets the tone of the organization. This includes the:

* Board of Directors and CEO

* Direct Reports (other C-levels, Vice President’s, Directors)

* Leadership must be at the front walking the walk and talking the talk.

* Law of Culture.

* “Culture eats strategy for lunch.”

* Create a culture of innovation to support a strategy of innovation.

* Culture has to:

* Involve people.

* Value ideas.

* All the resources need to be aligned.

* Communication needs to be clear.

* Law of Resources.

* This requires a committed level of resources to include people, money, time and equipment.

* Must effectively allocate and protect your resources.

* Law of Patience.

* Patience is critical for innovation.

* Management needs to have patience. Some innovation projects can take longer than twenty years to be completed.

* Law of Process.

* You can apply somebody else’s process, but you need to adapt the process to your organization.

* Needs to cover the full innovation chain.

* How you capture ideas.

* How you generate better ideas.

* How you identify the best ideas.

* How you execute those ideas.

* Never let your innovation process become stagnant.

* Law of the BHAG. (Bold, Hairy, Audacious, Goal).

* Unique characteristics of BHAG.

* Very clear and concise of what the target is.

* Needs to be a stretch.

* Let the process of innovation within your organization define the how.

* Law of Execution.

* Execution is the task of going through and putting a product out there for customers.

* Ideas without execution are a hobby.

* Think about segmenting the execution into phases.

* You will be able to kill projects that are not going to be successful.

* Allows you to reduce your risks.

* The objective is to actually execute, not review.

Not all organizations will be in a position to be successful in all of these laws.  Think about each of these laws and rank your organization.  Be honest with yourself on the areas you need to improve upon.  You can see our Organization’s Innovation Readiness survey based on the 7 Laws to assess and benchmark.

Five Questions to Ask an Innovation Consultant 

Have you noticed that the market is being flooded with a new type of consultant?  These people have branded themselves innovation consultants.  My advice to organizations is to treat consultants with a little bit of caution; they should be one of many inputs in the

Co-Innovation

What is Co-Innovation?  Co-Innovation is two parties with unique expertise that come together in a 50/50 funding of resources.  The key component being they have complimentary interests. Think of it as a Venn diagram.  The goal of Co-Innovation is to find where the Venn diagrams overlap.  Co-Innovation means:

* Two parties with patented expertise.

* A complete 50/50 venture.

* Define what it is/why it exists.

* Find the common area of interests.

* Agree on what the target is.

* How do you go about doing it.

* Neither of you can do it alone.

* You and your partner cannot do it alone.

* This creates mutual dependency.

* Requires both entities to participate in.

* You are going to launch a real product.

* The product had to be launched within 24 months.

* The product had to have high impact to both organizations.

If you set up a Co-Innovation program successfully, they will have benefits to your organization such as:

* Reducing risk.

* Speeding up delivery of innovation.

* Leveraging your R&D budget.

Lessons Learned

Over the years of creating these programs there are a couple lessons I have learned.

How do you manage these programs once they are under way?

* Use your senior executive sponsorship to set the pacing.

* Set gates and milestones.

* You must have clear targets.

* Share and show what you are working on.

* Get real feedback from customers using your products.

How do you get a Co-Innovation program going?

* You have to find the areas of mutual interests.

* This takes time and many conversations with leaders of other organizations.

* Set up a one-day workshop where teams from both sides talk about their areas of interests.

* Start working together as teams and propose a target.

When Co-Innovation programs go wrong, the case is usually that people want to call it a Co-Innovation program when it really is not.

* A lot of companies confuse Co-Innovation with contract R&D.

* Another is that a lot of people are really focused on research with no real plan. Innovation is all about execution.

* It turns into a PR or a marketing effort.

If you follow these basic rules, Co-Innovation programs can really ignite your organization and take you into market opportunities you would never be able to achieve on your own.

Strategic Storytelling

Why is it so hard for people to pitch their ideas?  To tell their ideas in a way that people swarm towards it and want to be a part of it.  The skill of the pitch is so hard to find.  What I have found is that the skill of pitch usually falls into two categories:

* The person making the pitch believes they can win you with facts

* They know what they are talking about.

* They attempt to belittle anyone who challenges them, with facts.

* Overwhelming with content

* They overwhelm you with an abundance of slides and content.

So, what is it that makes people struggle with coming up with a well thought-out and structured pitch?  Many people forget about the fact that decisions are personal.

The success of the Apollo 11 mission, the first moon landing, inspires our innovative passions and pursuits.  With the 50th Anniversary of Apollo 11 landing on the moon, I’ve been looking back at all of those that impacted and supported an incredible journey.  In this episode of Killer Innovations, I had the pleasure of interviewing the inventor of the early display technology that ultimately resulted in the creation of the moon monitor.  It was the moon monitor that allowed NASA and the rest of the world to watch Neil Armstrong walk on the moon.  An IEEE Fellow for Logic Analysis technology, he also was President of ACM, the world’s largest Computer Science society, and is an ACM Fellow. He holds HPs only Medal of Defiance, awarded by David Packard for “extraordinary contempt and defiance beyond the normal call of engineering duty”. Other awards include Engineer of the Year, Smithsonian Wizard of Computing, Top 50 inventions of the 20th century, CNN top 25 inventions of the past 25 years, Entrepreneuring Honor Roll.

Past in HP

Long before the Apollo 11 success, Chuck House was a physics major at CalTech when he had an interview with HP.  He went on to work at HP for 28 years. It was there that he was challenged by the CEOs and directors to be on top of innovation.  House says that every year at HP there was an oral exam to review each project. They would ask questions such as:

* What contribution does it make?

* Why is it ahead?

* What is the next step after this?

* What is the science underneath it?

The notion at the company was that you had to be part of a team and the team must understand the science behind what you are working on.  House discusses a number of insightful practices in a book  he co-authored about his time at HP.

Impactful Successes & Awards

House’s second project at HP, which ultimately led to the moon monitor for NASA, was to figure out how to stabilize a scope screen. The project appeared to have been a waste of time.  It even failed the technical evaluation. House was told to cancel the project and remove it from the lab.  Instead of abandoning the project, House and his team decided to put the product in production.  Within ten months it was finished. Who would have known about this project’s pivotal role in the Apollo 11 mission? The project turned out to be a huge success with sales to many leading companies and NASA.  Sixteen years later, in April of 1982, House was awarded a going away gift…the Award of Defiance.  House speaks more of this in his HP memoir.  House also received the Innovative Applications in Analytics Award (IAAA).  Other awards include Engineer of the Year, Smithsonian Wizard of Computing, Top 50 inventions of the 20th century, CNN top 25 inventions of the past 25 years, Entrepreneuring Honor Roll.

Words of Advice

Lastly, I asked House: What advice would you give people who really have a passion to be inventors, to be innovators, to really change the world? What advice would you give them? What should they do to get ready? House believes in a lot of experimenta...

What is the strength of innovation in your organization?  In this week’s Killer Innovations, we explore avenues to building innovation strength.  Innovation from Mergers and Acquisitions can be a fast track to innovation.  What are the pros and cons to this innovation path? We also look at the five biggest risks to innovation.  Your company’s innovation depends on avoiding the pitfalls. Is building innovation strength through acquiring innovation right for your company?  Avoiding the risks to innovation stretches across a broader spectrum.  Any company should be aware of the five biggest risks to innovation.

Mergers and Acquisitions: Acquiring Innovation

A growing means of building innovation strength is through acquiring innovation.  Innovation from Mergers and Acquisitions has its benefits and its drawbacks.  

To start, there are two types:

Acquiring a company outright

Purchasing the Intellectual Properties – This could be a product line, patents, a team, or a group of individuals with core expertise.

Let’s discuss the first type, acquiring the company.  Innovation from Mergers and Acquisitions has its pros and its cons.

Pros

* You can get into a market fast – you don’t have to wait for R&D.

* There are reduced risks.

Cons

* Reduced risks = lower returns.

* This approach can make an organization lazy.

* This approach can be expensive.

The most common reason for Innovation from Mergers and Acquisitions are:

Your company missed a trend and now you have to acquire company to get into the space.

You saw the trend, but didn’t realize its impact.

You saw the trend, but wanted to avoid the risk of investing in it.

Innovation from Mergers and Acquisitions can work if it is:

Proactive

Part of an innovation strategy

The second type of Innovation from Mergers and Acquisitions is purchasing Intellectual Properties (IP).  Why has it become so important? In a word: litigation. Patent lawsuits offer lucrative opportunity. Exclusivity to a company’s investment can reap financial gain.  This creates issues for those seeking to build innovation strength in this way. It can be especially difficult for the small business. To buy a patent can be expensive.  Options are out there for acquiring innovation to build innovation strength. Companies can join a patent pool. Another option is for companies to join forces and make a group purchase of a patent.

Patent Selling

Whether you are part of a large or small organization, think of this approach.  If you are a seller of patents, write it in your agreement. Prevent the buyer from using your patents in proactive litigation.  Allow the patents to only be used in defense. Why do people acquire patents?

To exert a form of control.

To create a defense.

Allowing your patents to be used only in defense, make them unattractive to patent trolls.  Patent trolls’ sole purpose is to buy patents and sue. We need to come up with a radical approach to addressing the patent lawsuit challenges that are taking place in organization.  

Another aspect of this are PCLs (Patent Cross Licenses).  Most large companies pre-negotiate a patent cross license.  This takes the whole risk of litigation off the table.  

The Five Biggest Risks to Innovation

It does not matter what or who you are as an organization.  It’s a common theme I have seen across organizations, irrespective of their size.  I’ve compiled what I’ve observed into “The Five Biggest Risks to Innovati...

Innovation is all about translating ideas into real products, real services and real solutions.   Ideas without execution are a hobby.  Is your organization in the business of innovation?   This week’s show boils it down to a simple equation.  Ideas + Innovation Culture = Innovation Success.  The process starts with ideas and the management of them.  But ideas won’t develop and thrive without the right culture.  Core Attributes are about setting the basis for Innovation Culture.  When you set up a good system of gathering ideas and lay a foundation for innovation culture, innovation success ensues.

Creating Order from the Brainstorm of Ideas

The process starts with ideas coming from many sources.  Then comes the question of how to manage your ideas.  How do you log, track and rank them?  Where are your ideas today in the innovation lifecycle?  What about from all the brainstorming sessions over the last few years… and could you easily put your hand on the list of those ideas?  Ideas have value over time.

The Idea Management System, Step By Step

If you believe ideas are the currency of the economy, you need to manage ideas as a valued asset for innovation success.  Treat ideas as a valuable asset.

What’s needed in an idea management system?

* Idea capture and tracking

* Easy way to put ideas in system, track over time, evaluate them and link to other ideas that could grow into something significant.

* Done by people on innovation team but also open to other people in the organization who can submit an idea easily – have one place to look for all assets

* Idea evaluation – some form of an idea evaluation tool that allows for management to assess and look at ideas more closely

* Does everyone in the organization look at it and vote

* Use a ranking process like F-Focus, I-Ideation, R-Ranking, E-Execution

* Crowd source feedback

* System must allow for Ad Hoc Team Collaboration

* As people submit an idea, people can search the system to see if someone has a similar idea across the organization – can team up, combine efforts and areas of expertise

* Social hub of innovation within an organization

* Get better ideas – cross organizational efforts – collaborations that generate exciting ideas

* Supports whatever your organization’s process is for innovation

* Tool needs to match today’s and even tomorrow’s process

* Track ideas through the gating process your organization uses

* Follows phases of innovation used

Lot of tools out there that force you to follow their process – be careful – you need a tool that follows your process.

* Needs to support pausing ideas

* Difference between a good idea and really great idea is not about the idea.  It’s about the timing.

* Market, customer, organization, government regulation are not ready – lots of reasons.

* Key is you always need ability to pause the idea – capture it so that can pause and pull out an idea later when timing is right

* Ability to issue challenges

* Don’t run idea management system like an electronic suggestion box – ideas will become incremental

* For breakthrough ideas, issue challenges: carefully worded questions, problems, areas of interest put out to the general population with some form of incentive for spending time thinking about ideas/approaches that will answer or solve that in form of ideas

When it comes to the process of generating ideas, the default answer is to host a brainstorming session.  Are there other ways to generate new ideas that are not dependent on traditional brainstorming?  Today on Killer Innovations, I am going to share with you five that I use.

Mind Mapping and Wishing 

Mind mapping is a fairly common term nowadays; there are many types of software proving templates for mind mapping.  Traditionally they are used to organize your data, but it is also a great way to generate new ideas.

* Develop your problem statement.

* Write down the problem statement in the center of your idea (whiteboards work great).

* Expand on this problem statement by surrounding it with terms that better describe what you need.

* Now add a second layer to each of your needs describing how you might be able to solve for these individual challenges.

* Keep adding to your mind map using the steps above until you have sufficiently broken down your problem into manageable parts.

It is a fantastic ideation technique that encourages creative answers.  Another great way to generate new ideas is wishing.  Wishing encourages your team to let imaginations run wild.  Assuming you have a well-researched and understood problem statement, ask each participant to dream up the most unattainable solutions they can think of related to the problem statement.  Create a list of a few dozen wishes and go through the wishes by considering and discussing the ideas in detail.  Ask yourself:

* What makes them so impossible?

* How can that idea be scaled down?

* Which features of that wish could we integrate into this other approach?

You might be surprised to discover applicable, real-world solutions among the team’s wildest wishes.

Six Thinking Hats

Six Thinking Hats by Dr. Edward de Bono unleashed a new approach to generating ideas by breaking down the ideas into six areas of thought.  It helps participants put themselves into the shoes of another.  The six hats are:

* Logic- the facts.

* Optimism- the value and the benefits.

* Devil’s Advocate- the difficulties and dangers.

* Emotion- Feelings and intuitions.

* Creativity- Possibilities and new ideas.

* Management- Making sure the rules of the hats are observed.

So, how do you use the tool? Have each member put on one of these different “hats” for the discussion. Make sure everyone has their say and for extended sessions, rotate the hats to others so everyone gets the opportunity to see the problem and ideas from a variety of different perspective.

Brain-writing and Forced Combinations

One challenge for generating ideas is to get everything that is rattling around in your head out.  In this exercise, each participant takes a piece of paper and writes down a few rough ideas for solving the problem statement.  Each piece of paper is then passed on to someone else, who reads it silently and adds their own ideas to the page.  This process is repeated until everyone has had a chance to add to each piece of paper.  Once each participant has retrieved their original piece of paper, they read and organize the ideas.  Then each participant shares the notes and ideas on their piece of paper.  The big advantage of brain-writing is that it makes sure everybody has an opportunity to share their ideas and it also reinforces the idea of “building on the ideas of others.”  The last way to generate ideas I wanted to share is one I have used with my own...