Why Innovations Fail

We all had experienced this. The boss had an exciting great idea and rallied the team to push for a big bang launch. Big marketing budget was given to deliver the product launch event. Huge cross functional task force formed with mandate to "make it happen". Regular steering committee meetings with top managements conducted to ensure commitment right from the top. But, it failed, miserably. Like fireworks in the sky. Beautiful launches but you can see no traces of it the next morning. The market adoption failed.What happened? Why did it fail? From my own painful experiences, there are three key reasons that cause great ideas to fail.1. Solving the wrong problem: What is the "Jobs-to-be-done?" We fell in love with our own idea too fast. We think we had got the next "Big Idea" that will change the world and focused all our resources to deliver the idea. We fail to spend enough time defining the "Jobs-to-be-done" (JTBD)."Jobs-to-be-done" is an approach advocated by Harvard Business School Professor, Clay Christensen in his book, "The Innovator's Solution." The key is to focus on the "problem" and not the "product." Like what Harvard Business School's Theodore Leviit said, "People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!"Before we gather the team to launch a product, we need to ensure that we are getting the problem statement right. What is the problem that we are trying to solve? What is the "Jobs-to-be-done" from the customer's point of view? In a large organization where we have sales department that is in-charged of fronting customers, marketing department that drives marketing promotions and campaigns and product team that is responsible for product roadmap, who is the driver to define the "JTBD?" Ideally, we should establish a cross-functional team to define "JTBD". The cross-functional team driving the innovation would be able to test the "JTBD" from different angles and through the process, align various department's understanding of "JTBD" for the new product. This process will minimise issues in large organization where execution fails because of differences in interpretation of what the product is "hired to do."2. Fail to test assumptions: What needs to be right before the innovation can happen?We are all great at creating beautiful business case that shows wonderful ROIs, IRR and whatever the finance department is asking for. However, when the rubber hits the road, more often than not, our assumptions are wrong. There is no point spending huge amount of time perfecting the spreadsheet numbers. As Intuit's founder, Scott Cook said in an interview by BusinessWeek, "For every one of our failures, we had spreadsheets that looked awesome."


The key is to understand the assumptions and drivers behind the business case. What are the assumptions that must be right before our innovation can happen? One useful tool is the "Discovery Driven Plan" advocated by Dr. Rita McGrath. In her words, it is a "Plan to learn" where she shared systematic ways to track key milestones and assumptions behind a new venture launch. As we launch new venture or products, we track the learning and test if the original assumptions are correct. If the data shows that our original assumptions are wrong, we would know the next course of action to take.At times, market might have shifted. For example, price erosion in the market might be higher than the original assumption due to increased competitive pressure. All these are dynamic. Hence it is critical to test the assumptions along with the tracking of key milestones. This will create a closed-loop system for the team to know when and how to change the next course of action.3. Measuring the wrong thing: Aborting too early, too fastIn large organizations, the finance department would have a set of metrics to measure the success of products or departments. These are very often the revenue, profit margin, market share and growth rates. For emerging technologies or new businesses, the metrics used to measure the success must be different from mature products and segments. If not, we will risk killing the idea too early, too fast.The metric to measure innovation should be heavily weighted on growth momentum. That indicates the market acceptance of the idea and the growth potential of the innovation. In the initial phase, the team driving the innovation will need time to learn if the original idea hits the sweet spot of the market. Is the product meeting the "JTBD" expected by customers? The team will need time to tweak the design and business model and track the response before recommending the next steps. This defers from the execution for mature products where the momentum is already there and processes and machineries are in place to drive revenue growth.In many instances, we would get pressure from bosses when the revenue from new innovation seems small when compared to mature products. When cost cutting pressure weights in, the new innovation maybe aborted as it will not survive the measure of "Revenue over Cost" ratio as it has not reached scale. The key is to get the metric right to ensure right decision made to either continue with the development of an innovation or to abort and fail fast and cheap.These are three fundamentals that we need to fix to make sure we can execute our innovation strategies effectively.

Who's In Your Garage?

There's a story that someone once asked Bill Gates where his greatest competition was. The expectation was that he would mention another major high tech company competing for the same business. Instead, Gates said he was more worried about two guys in a garage; quite the antithesis of the presumed response. Why should he be concerned with two guys in a garage?Because there are people like John Nottingham and John Spirk, who founded their namesake company in 1972, in a garage (several years before Microsoft was born). After graduating from the Cleveland Institute of Art, they declined offers from well-respected and established companies to instead strike out on their own and form their namesake company. Their objective was to design products using a different business model. Instead of creating products and then trying to sell them to other companies or customers; they invited companies to bring their product predicaments to the Nottingham Spirk Innovation Center. They then engineer solutions for these companies and receive payment in the form of royalties on sales, or a flat rate up front.Today they've moved from the garage to a converted church building in Cleveland, Ohio, where with a small team of 70 people, they've amassed over 900 patents to their credit. This includes repackaging Purell hand sanitizer, developing the Twist and Pour paint can for Sherwin Williams, developing Dirt Devil products, Scott's Snap Lawn Spreader, the Unilever Axe Bullet, Swiffer SweepVac, and the Crest Spinbrush.Garage ThinkingOne obvious question is why companies like these weren't able to solve their product dilemmas internally. My guess is that they needed an external perspective and focus; literally, someone to help them think outside their corporate box or mindset. They needed to be able to think like they were in the garage by starting from the beginning and taking a fresh and different approach.Think about it. As leaders, how many times have we had a product or process dilemma where we needed a simple, but elegant solution? We come at it from every angle we can think of. We brainstorm, use mindmaps, and other elaborate problem solving techniques. But when we casually mention the issue to someone totally unconnected to our organization, they quickly come up with a new perspective on how to solve it. Sometimes their suggestion is so simple that we initially dismiss it, because after all they don't understand the complexities, rules and processes of what we do. But in reality, the customer needs uncomplicated answers, not encumbered by the back office complexity of how we got there.


Sometimes we find a need for this in our personal lives. How many times have you been thinking though a major decision, or wondering how to handle a situation. You labored with it, until one day you mentioned it to a friend, loved one, coach or even a total stranger. Maybe they only asked you one question, but it was so perceptive and insightful that almost instantly, you had the answer. You knew what to do.The Magic of a GarageSo back to the two guys in a garage. There's a slew of companies that started out in the proverbial garage like Amazon, Disney, Apple, Hewlitt Packard, Google and Harley Davidson. A couple of guys and gals, slogging through a problem that no one else perceived as a problem or took the time to resolve. They took risks because at that point they had nothing, so there was nothing to lose. They had few predispositions as to how their project should operate because it had never been done before. There was no bureaucracy or lengthy decision making process impinging on their activity. The boundaries of imagination were wide, and the possibilities for development and integration of technology were unlimited.Sometimes, in the midst of all the business challenges and demands on our time, we need to find time to become two guys in a garage. Find that spot where we can innovate, concentrate, create, and view situations from the perspective of a learner to come up with an answer. Or find a few people on our team who can work on the issues without being encumbered with an expected solution; who can innovate, inquire, and integrate to arrive at the best answer. So who's in your garage?Read the Forbes article for more information on the Nottingham Spirk Innovation Center.

Becoming an Influencer: Obtaining Fulfillment Through Team Behavior

It all comes down to the big question-what is the meaning of life?In an attempt to extract the most possible value from this question, and apply it to the marketplace in our modern world, I ask this question instead: what gives your life meaning?This inquiry can be reworded in several different ways to offer fresh perspectives as well:
- What makes you feel passionate as a human being?
- What gives your life a sense of purpose?
- How can we take the work that we do throughout our lives, in all of our thoughts and our actions and our behaviors, and use this to make our lives meaningful?These questions, as well as the search for their answers, can be applied to every aspect of our day-to-day lives. Specifically, considering them in relation to our workplace environment.With that being said, how do we obtain our personal fulfillment within an organization?Indeed, the act of asking these questions, some if not most of which have no distinct answers, is the initial step needed to address rethinking the structure of an effective and creative organization.A conscious examination of our motives can be useful not only for the obtainment of our own personal fulfillment, but also to help us further understand how to harness a genuine sense of purpose in our lives and cause that purpose to spread-to help those around us.In our modern world, technology makes it possible for just about anyone to share what is on his or her mind and to connect those thoughts on a global scale.
With a population upwards of 7 billion people, we are faced with a lot of ideas!The idea of becoming an influencer, of starting movements, of creating and empowering trends, can be accomplished through successful team behavior. This is most significantly made possible through strong leadership and effective communication.Now, let us take a step back from leadership and team behavior, for a moment, in order to better understand the importance an influencer plays on impacting an organization.


An influencer holds the role as leader, and the leader acts as a catalyst. His or her individualistic thoughts and motives are what will give a specific goal or vision value.Why-because the leader is not afraid to step forward and take action.So, when applying the concept of leadership to an organization, who should step forward as a leader? Well, if the goal is to maximize the productivity of your organization, the answer is: everyone.Imagine the enormous benefits of every single individual within your organization both taking action and communicating as a leader. What would be some of the results?
- effective communication of ideas, goals, and visions to all members involved in a creative project
- the involvement of every team member in creating a necessary plan of action towards the obtainment of your organization's objectives
- increased personal accountability towards individual thoughts and actions
- a higher sense of purposeDo you like seeing results? Let everyone within your organization have the creative freedom necessary to maximize his or her productivity. Remove the reigns and allow the individuals within your organization to take responsibility for their actions.If every individual within an organization is allowed the creative freedom to take charge and achieve the goals of the organization in his or her own way, does that not in turn increase productivity?What about team morale? Does this newfound sense of purpose and mutual cooperation help an individual grow as both a valued member and leader of the team?If every individual within your organization experiences personal growth and increases his or her productivity-how does that affect the organization as a whole?This is the effect of team behavior within an organization. It affects everybody, and it begins with you.

An International Economy Means I Need an International Patent, Right?

Now that your interest is piqued, let me clarify that if you're new to the world of patents, an international patent does not exist. Patents must be filed on a country-by-country basis. However, there is an international patent application (PCT), and filing with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) that allows you 30 months to decide which individual countries are the best fit for your product and business model.However, the question of how to protect your product in an international marketplace is increasingly common now that some of the major online retailers such as alibaba.com and aliexpress.com are based outside the United States. Having the ability to sell your product to an international market can seem like the ideal opportunity. However, you may need protection from counterfeiters who also think that selling your product outside the United States is the ideal opportunity--and trust me, they won't be sending you revenue.If you're anticipating working with an overseas manufacturer, you may need to obtain a patent in that country. The other situation to consider is if you are already manufacturing your product in another country, and want to begin sales in the United States. I'll also discuss this scenario further in this article.Before selling your product outside the United States, you need to take into account the vastly different cultural and market preferences outside the country. As anyone who has ever gone into an international supermarket knows, packaging, taste and product selection can differ greatly from what is available on shelves in the U.S. You need to conduct some market research to ascertain the depth of product demand before making the leap. Some countries may be culturally similar to the United States, and your product would only require minor modifications. Additionally you will need to develop relationships with local distributors, which can be another substantial hurdle to overcome. Before investing millions in manufacturing your product for an international market, you will want to conduct this extensive research.The irony is that even if you have no intention of selling your product internationally, there may be a company specializing in manufacturing counterfeit merchandise who thinks otherwise. A trend I've seen more and more is inventions, which have been illegally copied, appearing on Chinese domestic (Taobao) and international (Aliexpress) online retail websites. Since China is the second largest market and manufacturer in the world, it does make sense that this would happen. Fortunately, it is possible to protect your interests with a China-based patent, respected by the online retailers, which provides the legal "teeth" to ask them to remove the counterfeit products from their websites. It's necessary to closely monitor those situations (which does turn into a marathon game of Whack-A-Mole), but the quickest way to eventually erode market share in the United States is to let these counterfeiters continue.


Fortunately, the process of obtaining patent protection for your product outside the United States is made somewhat simpler thanks to the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT). This provides a common patent application format accepted by the local patent offices of most countries of the world (except Taiwan) to meet a consistent set of standards which the participating countries have agreed to accept. If you are considering manufacturing in Taiwan, you would need to file there directly before the one-year term of the U.S. provisional patent expires.Here's an overview of the timing for the process. If you start with a U.S. provisional application, you have one year to get your PCT on file. That moves the deadline out to 30 months from the date of the original provisional application to decide which countries to obtain a patent in. Keep in mind that some countries require a translation if your original application is in English.If your product is really taking off, you can file the PCT application immediately in the countries you are interested in. However, most inventors find it takes longer than 30 months to develop a foreign market, and have to make the decision to file before success in the country is established.If you are an international inventor or manufacturer who is looking to expand into the United States, you need to talk to a patent agent or patent attorney before you make your product public anywhere in the world or offer it for sale in the U.S. A point to consider is where to file the provisional application, either in the United States or your home country, and unfortunately, there isn't an easy answer, each case needs to be discussed individually. It's also necessary to discuss the adaptations you will need to make to enter the market, and there is a high probability that some of those modifications will be patentable as well.

Creativity and Innovation As a Competency

The S.C.R.E.A.M technique can assist you to direct your organization to come up with innovative solutions that will work effectively and productively. As long as you are in a leadership position you will need S.C.R.E.A.M to get to the root of the problem fast and find any ways and means to resolve that problem.To be innovative and creative the first thing to do is to find areas in your work environment that provides opportunities to innovate. This can be anything ranging from your customer relationship management, new processes, and new services, improving your workflow, developing new products or improving the quality of your current product. The list is not exhaustive.Once you find an area to innovate the next step is for you to identify and frame the opportunity. In doing this you have to come up with an action plan on how you are going to go about innovating. You will have to study your existing situation and do some forward thinking to see in what direction that you want to go. You will have to gather relevant data that will eventually allow you to come up with a workable solution. Once you have done this you need to implement the solution to see whether it works and if necessary rework the concept.To assist you in this process S.C.R.E.A.M is an ideal tool. This is what you can do:Substitute your current situation with something else
Through substitution you can find opportunities to come up with new ideas and to see what works and whether there is a more efficient system. In the past there were some babies who are born with a rare condition of lactose intolerance. This means that they are unable to drink milk as these babies do not produce the enzyme lactase that helps break down the protein in milk which is their only source of nutrient in their formative year. Through medical breakthrough nutritionist were able to develop a substitute soymilk for babies with fortified vitamin and other ingredients that give these babies a fighting chance at survival.Combine your ideas with other ideas
On paper it may look perfect but when put to the test in might prove infeasible and unreliable. This is where you need to see the need to combine your idea with someone else's to see whether you can come up with something unique and workable. Think about shampoo and conditioner. Two separate products and through combination there is now conditioning shampoo. Further combination of adding certain type of essential oil to these shampoos and now there are shampoos for various kinds of hair type.


Reverse the situation and rearrange the facts
Innovative solutions sometimes can come about through reversing the existing situation and rearranging the facts. Henry Ford asked a simple question of what if instead of the worker having to go to his work, the work comes to him instead. With a little bit of strategic thinking Ford came up with the concept of production line where each worker stand by the conveyor belt and the work comes to him instead.Eliminate the unnecessary and elaborate on the features
Ermal Fraze wondered whether there is a better method to open the can instead of using the can opener. What will happen if the can opener was eliminated? With a bit of creative insight the pop-up can was born. Ask yourself whether there are protocols, features and other unnecessary things that you are doing that if these were to be eliminated will make you more productive, efficient and effective without compromising the quality, safety, health, legal and ethical issues.Adapt and Modify
The art of innovation is the ability to adapt to existing situation and coming up with an effective and workable solution. By modifying key components to a product it becomes possible to come up with new ideas in different industry. Guglielmo Marconi intention was to promote the usage of the radio for ship to ship and ship to shore communication. Reginald Fessenden in 1906 unwittingly gave the idea that a radio does not necessarily be used for communication with ships only but it could be used for broadcasting music. This was the beginning of radio broadcast that still is very much a part of our lives.So go ahead SCREAM and innovate.

A Systematic Approach to Process Innovation

The competitive environment never seems to get any easier, and just to stay as competitive as last year we need to execute better this year. Continuous Improvement seems necessary just to stay in the game...To pull significantly ahead, an organization must make process innovations in addition to continuous improvements.A process innovation is one that significantly changes the speed, the cost, and/or an aspect of the quality of the process or service, and has the potential to change the competitive landscape.For example, an insurance company overwhelmed the competition by shortening the time between claim filing and payment from weeks to hours. A small bank picked up market share through a process innovation reducing the number of days to approval by 80%. Many businesses have learned how to do a single minute change-over.Each of these process innovations challenged and overcame powerful assumptions. Every business operates under the constraints of operating assumptions. We may not even think of them as assumptions, but rather as facts-of-life, because they are so ingrained in our organization's paradigm. But to achieve a significant breakthrough, we have to identify and overcome a significant operating assumption and rewrite the rules of the game.This is easier said than done, of course; and in most cases a systematic approach to inventive problem solving is required.In the 1950's, for example, a Russian innovator believed that innovation processes could be improved by studying patterns in problems and solutions. His team analyzed millions of patents to identify patterns, and they deduced from this data a small number of principles that can be applied to make the creative process more predictably effective. They called this research the Theory of Inventive Problem-Solving or TRIZ, (pronounced "trees"). TRIZ is an acronym for Russian words that translate as "the theory of inventive problem solving."The basic premise is that there is nothing new under the sun. Whatever your challenge, if you understand it both in its specific and general form and you do the research, you will find that someone somewhere has solved it. Then if you focus your creativity on adapting the general solution to your particular challenge, you will achieve your breakthrough faster and more predictably.


TRIZ accelerates breakthroughs by guiding the human intellect along paths most likely to be fruitful. And speed of innovation is essential because most people and groups abandon an audacious goal fairly quickly and settle for a compromise.Slow innovation = no innovation.The developers and practitioners of TRIZ observe that problems emerge from contradictions, and that most solutions aim at compromising with the contradictions instead of overcoming them. Here are some of the contradictions that may appear in the workplace:It takes time to do something the right way, but the thing must be done quickly
A task requires precision, but it must be done without precise tools
A product must have dozens of features, but it must be simple to useEach problem is a specific example of a general contradiction. TRIZ research has paired every general contradiction with a small number of general solutions. So a practitioner of TRIZ focuses her effort and intellect on translating the specific problem into one of several dozen general problems.The next step is to look up in the TRIZ resources the general solutions that have been applied to that general problem in the past. Then one focuses one's creativity on identifying and testing specific solutions that could apply the general solution to the problem at hand. TRIZ research and practice has been expanded into a rich tool kit for innovation, but probably the simplest approach is to use the '40 Principles.' A list of these can be found at triz-journal.com.

What Is A Calorimeter For?

In the process industries, the use of a calorimeter is common especially those that are in the natural gas or other fuel gas manufacturing. Calorimeter comes in different types and choosing the one that will suit your company's needs will help you obtain correct measurement of the CV or WI of your products.CalorimeterCalorimeter is an instrument which usually can be seen in Physics labs and used to measure the heat capacity or the amount of heat being released during a chemical or physical change by different chemical substances. Most calorimeters are made up of a simple thermometer attached to a container made from metal. The metal container is usually full of water and suspended above a combustion chamber.Types of CalorimeterCalorimeter comes in different types depending on its use. Reaction calorimeter is commonly used in the industrial process industry as one needs to run machines at a constant temperature. There are four methods to measure the heat with the use of the reaction calorimeter; these are through heat flow control, heat balance, use of heater through power compensation and constant flux calorimetry. Calorific value analyzer measures and monitors gases, biogas and other petrochemical waste gases.Bomb calorimeter or constant volume calorimetry is another calorimeter type which is used by industries that require a constant holding volume of its processes while being able to resist enormous amounts of pressure. Bomb calorimeter is often used when one wants an accurate measure of the heat released during a combustion reaction. The calorimeter uses a steel bomb-like container to hold the reactant, a thermometer, a motorized stirrer and a wire to ignite it. The container is submerged into a water bath which will be measured once the wire is ignited inside the steel container.


Adiabatic calorimeter is another type which analyses the runaway reaction under adiabatic environment. Adiabatic reaction occurs in gas industry plants where the change in the temperature is due to the change of the gas pressure without any outside interference.Calvet-type calorimeter is beneficial as it can be used in just about any experimental vessel volume without affecting the accuracy of the measurement.Aside from the equipment mentioned above, there are other calorimeters available. If you are interested in checking out the various devices, you can visit one of the industrial suppliers that do sell such devices as well as portable analyzer, H2S analyzer and calorific value analyzer.

Business People and Students Have More in Common Than You Think

You may be under the impression that there is not a lot in common between business people and students. So, compare a 10-year-old dyslexic student who has specific failing points in school to a company about to close. One of the first things they have in common is that they feel blocked in and the world is telling them everything they are doing wrong. They both have lousy reports, feel like they are running out of time and they appear to be putting in huge amounts of effort for very little results.Now compare a 13-year-old student enjoying new life experiences and demands to a business also having a sudden growth spurt. The teenager is suddenly part of a much bigger organization of sorts. They have many skills to learn and new teachers to understand. We can easily compare this to a business that has abruptly grown with new employees, new products, new research and a lot more people to manage.Also compare a 15-year-old exam student who has done great and is heading for the final stages of school to a multi million dollar project that needs a very targeted strategy. You are swiftly deciding what skills you need for your career, which subjects you are going to take forward and how you are going to get there. With a multi million dollar project you are effectively making all of the same decisions.You could start to compare a 17-year-old exam student's overwhelming workload and study schedule to a company that dramatically finds itself in the media spotlight in a positive manner. Both can quite easily start to hyper ventilate and panic. I have worked with companies whose telephone lines melted down under the strain and staff were not able to get an available line out of their offices for over a week.At this stage I wish to point out why life coaching is a waste of time. Life coaching does not work, cram schools are a waste of money and 99% of private tuition is a very short term solution. Continuity is vital to sustainability and you must pick up the juggling balls and be prepared to help directly long term when needed, not just at the start.


I profile the elements that matter and create methods around them. Like how people tick, what they need now and how they need it. But what is more vital is the strategy that goes with it. I work with a cross section of people aged from 18 month old toddlers to 72 year olds. They are from hundreds of different backgrounds worldwide, stages in life and business varieties.I am strange in that I take on clients for life. It is very rewarding to start working with people when they are 10 and now I am introducing them to their first real world business internships at 16. The stories are no less dramatic in the business world. When I have gone in to restructure companies that were about to close the doors I still support their growth several years later. They got out of the red but went through growing pains and I am still needed as a safety net.Many people say things like "with success comes new challenges and with age comes new issues" but life coaching, cram schools and most private tuition is just short term crisis management that never sticks around long enough to help long term.Much of my success is down to developing methods that allow me to profile people. Take the 5-year-old with language development issues, the 15-year-old with asperger's syndrome and the 45-year-old's business and family issues. In all of these types of cases I get sonic speed results because I focus on what they need right there and then. There's a development path so it is a combination of understanding timescales and Purple Success methods.Here is a limitation that I have found with traditional education system teachers around the world. All of my team have been on specific career paths so they can actually write a letter of introduction for a job or a course for a student but most teachers have never done this and most career guidance teachers do not actually have business careers. Also, schools do not teach goals and goal setting and you are not going anywhere unless you have a goal to achieve. The real golden nugget is to continually set new goals.