The Innovators Studio with Phil McKinney

In this episode, we discussed the process (and challenges) of going from invention, to innovation and then ultimately to commercialization.  The question covered:

* What are the three attributes of a great innovation roadmap?

* Why are good requirements so critical for successful innovation and commercialization efforts?

* Can you create metrics that are meaningful for innovation?

* Is the challenges for partnerships different between public and private organizations?

* How does the US stack up when it comes to invention, innovation and commercialization?

Guest: Dr Tom Cellucci

Dr. Tom Cellucci has been a senior executive in both the private and public sectors for over 32 years. He served as the US Government’s first-ever Chief Commercialization Officer, working for both President Bush and President Obama. Tom leads a successful management consulting firm, Cellucci Associates, Inc., based in Cambridge, MA. He has authored or co-authored 24 scholarly books and over 192 high-tech business articles. Cellucci earned a PhD in Physical Chemistry from the University of Pennsylvania (1984), an MBA from Rutgers University (1991) and a BS in Chemistry from Fordham University (1980).

For more, see  www.cellucciassociates.com.

Killer Question:

What are we throwing away because we assume it has no value?

My wife is famous for being a little frugal. She once routed me and our son Logan from Las Vegas to Phoenix to Los Angeles and finally to San Jose because she could save twenty bucks each over the nonstop fare. Kind of nuts, right? But if I’m honest I have the same mind-set in one respect: I am determined to squeeze everything I can out of any idea or opportunity that is available to me. I am diligent about looking at information and ideas that supposedly have “no value” and wondering, “Hey, maybe they do.”

What I mean by this is simple. Just because you or your business has always operated under the assumption that something—be it data, ideas, or scraps from the manufacturing process—is essentially worthless, it doesn’t mean that that assumption was ever, or still is, true. I constantly review the stuff that gets thrown away and ask myself, “Is there value here?”

One of my big breaks was becoming one of the early executives at Teligent, in 1997. Teligent provided phone service to businesses across the United States and in twelve other countries. The core products were voice and data services to businesses. There wasn’t much to differentiate us from our competitors. Basically we were all competing on the same fundamental premise: providing a good, reliable service at a cheaper price. Here’s the problem with that: If there are no significant differences between you and your competitors, you are essentially in a stalemate, until one of you finds a way to differentiate from the pack. So, even as our company continued to hum along nicely I started asking the questions about who we were, what we were doing, and how we were doing it.

I started doing some internal investigating about the information we were gathering from our customers. After a little persistence, I got hold of the complete call-detail records for our network. In the telecom industry, the network throws away any record that isn’t relevant to billing. The result was that 70 percent of the information in call-detail records was thrown away. A customer rang a business, the line was free, the call was answered, and a charge was added to the bill. Great, that’s how we make money. But looking through the full call-detail records, I noticed something interesting: The logs showed not only the ...

Culture is critical for teams and organizations looking to be have significant innovation impact. Based on working across large, small, non-profit and government agencies, I've discovered what are a common set of four culture attributes in organizations that were highly innovative. We validate these and other attributes that make-up culture for an organization with this weeks guest.

Guest: Dr. Natalie Baumgartner

Dr. Natalie Baumgartner is a Co-Founder and the Chief Psychologist at RoundPegg. RoundPegg is The Culture and Engagement Platform for all companies. We strive to make it possible for people to fit and thrive where they work. With Culture Science at it’s core, the RoundPegg culture and engagement platform helps companies increase engagement, reduce churn, retain top talent, and break down silos using web-based social apps. Natalie has been the human form of RoundPegg for over a decade, consulting on corporate culture with investors, senior executives and boards of directors. She holds a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology and serves on the board of the Consulting Psychology Division of the American Psychological Association. She is a popular speaker on culture, engagement, mergers/acquisitions and change management – and a TEDx speaker on Culture Fit. Natalie is a culture evangelist and is passionate about the power that company culture has to revolutionize how we work.

You can connect at Roundpegg

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Killer Question

Can I create an on-demand version of the product?

Do you need to have a finished product in order to make a sale? Is there any way that not offering a finished product would actually give you an advantage, or even become a selling point? Suppose that your manufacturing costs appear to have gotten as low as they can without sacrificing quality. Even if your costs are acceptable to you, you still have to deal with the lag time between ordering a product and having it manufactured and shipped to you—typically six weeks from China. Perhaps this lag time causes you to lose sales, or to miss the window of opportunity for your product if you’re aiming to respond quickly to a short-lived fad. Is there any other option besides relying on this manufacturing and supply chain?

My children have long since outgrown toys, but if they were still young today, I’d probably be roped into visits to Build-A-Bear. Build-A-Bear, like the paint-your-own pottery craze that preceded it, doesn’t offer a finished product. In fact, the whole selling point is that you create your own customized product in-store. These types of businesses are offering a dual product: both the end result—be it a stuffed animal in a personalized costume or an “I Love Dad” coffee mug—and the chance to create something without taking responsibility for gathering materials or cleaning up the mess it generates. A stuffed toy may feel like a low-risk product, but children’s tastes, interests, and fads can be as fickle as an adult’s. Just ask any parent. Once you start adding the layers of design and complexity to a toy—clothes, accessories, prerecorded sounds—you risk creating something that misses the mark with your target audience. Build-A-Bear’s strategy is very clever in that it allows them to keep components, rather than finished products, as inventory. They never have to run the risk of being stuck with 10,000 astronaut bears the week after the latest Pirates of the Caribbean opens. Or conversely, having 10,000 pirate bears in anticipation of a hit only to find the franchise has run out of gas and the kids don’t care.

There are two points to take from this. The first is that these companies are reducing their risk of having a stockroom full of faddish, briefly popular products that they now can’t sell.

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When someone says innovation, most default to products or services but innovation can be applied to anything. In this weeks, show, we will take a look at innovating a brand. Our guest, Michael Mendenhall, will share his thoughts and experience in successful brand innovation.

This Weeks Guest: Michael Mendenhall – CMO for Flextronics

Michael is the Chief Marketing and Chief Communications Officer at Flextronics where he most recently led the re-branding of the firm to Flex.

Previously, he served as the Chief Marketing & Communications Officer and Executive Vice President of Fusion-io, Inc. From 2007 through 2011, he served as Global Chief Marketing Officer and Senior Vice President at Hewlett Packard. where his organization directed all aspects of the Fortune-10 company’s corporate marketing operations globally, including brand strategy, digital strategy, integrated design, strategic partnerships, customer intelligence, and hp.com among other responsibilities.

Read more about Michael …

This Weeks Killer Question/Brain Hack

What emotional, psychological, or status benefits could people derive from using my product?

Do you have diamonds stashed away that you reckon you can sell if times ever get tough? Say, a family heirloom, or an engagement ring from a failed marriage? Perhaps you know how much the diamond was appraised for by a reputable seller and feel confident that you can get a reasonable return on your investment. If so, you’re in for a disappointing surprise.

In the late 1880s, a group of British financiers who’d invested heavily in South African diamond mines grew alarmed at the discovery of vast new supplies of the supposedly scarce gem. They realized that the value of their What—diamonds—was essentially the public’s perception of them as both extremely rare (and thus valuable), and a sign of sophistication and affluence. This belief about what the diamond merchants were selling would be irreparably damaged if the world’s markets were suddenly flooded with the gems. The financiers banded together, formed the De Beers consortium, and have managed and manipulated both the supply of diamonds and the public’s perception of them ever since.

In the late 1940s they coined the phrase “A diamond is forever” and persuaded young couples everywhere that the purchase of one was an essential symbol of love and devotion. In the late ’50s, they responded to a glut of tiny diamonds from the Soviet Union by creating the idea of and the market for the “eternity ring.” The eternity ring was promoted as a gift for established couples to celebrate their ongoing commitment. Rather than one large diamond, the ring was comprised of a string of tiny diamonds set in a band. Prior to the eternity ring, customers were more interested in purchasing large diamonds. De Beers was able to convince consumers that these small diamonds were equally desirable by creating the idea that the small diamonds represented the passing of the years. Smart. Even more cleverly, they realized that by marketing diamonds as both investments and emotional signifiers, customers would keep them rather than reselling them down the line. You might part with Grandma’s bond portfolio, but you were far less likely to sell her ring. This sentiment helps keep untold billions of dollars of privately owned diamonds off of the market, thereby keeping the price of “new” diamonds high. Brilliant.

However, the actual value of a diamond is negligible. Recently a friend took a loose diamond to a dealer. She had vague plans of buying a twin for it and making earrings...