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I’m taking part in a Post2Post Virtual Book Tour for Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, the new book by Made to Stick authors Chip Heath and Dan Heath about how to make change happen. The topic is of great importance to innovators, since change is at the heart of innovation.

At the heart of Switch is this framework that sets out three ways change happens:

1. Direct the Rider (the conscious mind), eliminating what looks like resistance but is more often a lack of clarity by providing crystal-clear direction.
2. Motivate the Elephant (the subconscious), eliminating what looks like laziness but is more often exhaustion by engaging emotions to get them on the same path as you.
3. Shape the Path (the situation), eliminating what looks like a people problem but is more often a situation problem, by making the environment more conducive to the change you seek.

Switch co-author Dan Heath answered questions I sent him about how Switch works from the perspective of an innovator:

Q. What are Switch’s main takeaways for innovators?

A. Switch discusses a simple framework for changing behavior. Innovators will need this skill more than most people, since they need to convince their colleagues to adopt new practices and their customers to embrace new products. One core principle of behavior change, which is particularly relevant to innovators, is that people rarely change because they are provided with information. Change comes from feeling, and the feeling provides us the motivation we need to overcome the nuisance of making changes.

So if you’re leading change, you should ask yourself, “What can I get my colleagues or customers to feel?” As an example, consider Robyn Waters, who helped transform Target into the design powerhouse it is today. In convincing Target’s merchants to take a chance on new designs or new colors, she’d constantly show them things. See, look how using the bright blue Polo shirt makes your display “pop.” And they’d get inspired by what they saw and give her a chance. She never could have convinced them with a memo or a PowerPoint.

Q. What are the ways the relatively simple behavioral change of using checklists can drive more creative and innovative behavior (or outcomes)?

A. Checklists are basically insurance against overconfidence. A checklist will never generate an innovation — that’s not the point. What checklists can do is train your innovative mind on the right issues. Let me give you an example. There’s a classic study in psychology that asked students to come up with a solution for their university’s chronic parking problem. Ideas ranged from raising parking fees to creating more “Compact Only” parking spaces. After the ideas were collected, a panel of experts assessed them — eliminating wacky or impractical options — and identified a set of “best solutions”. The average individual brainstormer came up with 30 percent of the best solutions, which is pretty good for a solo effort. Here’s what’s not so good: The brainstormers confidently predicted that they’d identified 75 percent of the best ideas. Whoops.

So imagine if we’d provided those students with a checklist of “solution categories” to guide their thinking about the parking solution. We’d remind them to think about things like “solutions that raise the cost of parking” and “solutions that help more cars park in the same amount of space” and so on. It would have sparked their thinking and kept them from forgetting key areas of consideration.

Q. If a company’s goal is to help its employees become more innovative, which is the best approach? Direct the Rider, Motivate the Elephant, or Shape the Path? Is there a desired combination for increasing more creative, innovative behavior? Or would the solution be very situation-specific?

The solutions will be situation-specific, but the strategy won’t be. If you want your employees to be more innovative and creative, think in terms of a three-front campaign:

1. Provide crystal-clear direction. In a change effort, what looks like resistance is often a lack of clarity. For instance, what does it mean to be more “creative” or “innovative”? Different organizations would interpret those terms very differently. Do you want people to submit ideas for new products or processes? Do you want them to spend more hours in the field shadowing customers? Do you want them to build prototypes of their designs more rapidly? A leader needs to translate aspirations into actions — so think in terms of the behaviors that you want to encourage.
2. Find the motivation. As mentioned earlier, change comes from feeling. Why should people bother to act differently? After all, they’ve been practicing the “old ways” of behaving for months or years. It will take enormous effort for them to retrain themselves. Why should they bother? The motivation might come from the desire to correct mistakes — imagine screening a video of a customer who experienced a lot of hassle because of your team’s failure. Or you could imagine appealing to their desire to be the best — painting a picture of an innovation that, if executed correctly, would blow people’s minds.
3. Clear the path. If you want your team to be more creative and innovative, how many obstacles can you clear from their path? Can you create better IT systems to automate some of the bureaucratic duties that crowd out their creative time? Will you create PDA-free “quiet hours” so they can focus? Will you pay for offsite meetings so they can collaborate more easily? If you reflect on your own experiences, you’ll surely realize that there were some environments in which you found it easy to be creative and others where it was impossible. How can you create an environment that makes it easy on your team?

Q. Driving innovation within a company often requires people to embrace contradiction – think analytically yet also think metaphorically; focus on the near-term result yet also think out to the future; drive incremental innovation to keep the near-term bottom line growing yet also drive breakthrough innovation to keep the company growing into the future. Obviously it’s important to know when to switch focus. But how do you change into someone who has this capacity, when hardly anyone has it naturally? What do you change about yourself to be able to do this?

I see these more as balancing acts rather than contradictions. E.g., you need a balance of short-term focus and long-term focus. And I disagree with you — I think we all have this capacity to balance. But sometimes we’ll end up out of balance — say, too focused on short-term results — and then we’ll need to correct the situation. And that’s when the strategy discussed above — clear direction, emotional motivation, and a clear path — can be employed.

People tend to moan and groan about change, but the fact is, we’re all pretty good at it. People get married, they have kids, they switch jobs, they move cities, they embrace new technologies, they eat new foods and wear new clothes. Of course, that doesn’t mean your change at work will be easy, but it does mean there’s no one on your team who lacks the capacity for change.

The other day, one of my colleagues asked me, "What exactly do you mean when you use the word 'innovation?'" Answering the question led to a productive discussion about what really inhibits innovation inside large organizations.

When I use the word innovation, I think of three interlocking components:

• Insight or inspiration suggesting an opportunity to do something different to create value
• An idea or plan to build an offering based on that insight or inspiration
• The translation of that plan into a successful business (in simple terms, commercialization)

Obviously, each of these components carries significant complexity, but more often than not, they cover the basics of innovation.

The senior leaders I talk to believe that the bulk of their innovation challenges lie in the first two components. I suspect this is because the third piece looks like execution, and of course, large organizations know all about execution. And yet, my field experience suggests that it's this third component, not the first two, that actually blocks innovation.

Most companies are drowning in insight — although they don't always know it. You can almost always find compelling ideas and well-developed plans. And, of course, as I've noted many times before, a plan almost always changes a few times before a truly viable business emerges.

The hard part is in the doing, in taking the requisite steps to translate an idea that looks great on paper into profits.

I call this the "First Mile" problem. The name borrows from a well-known problem in telecommunications-related industries in the 1990s. At the time, technologies in the "core" of the network were rapidly improving. But most consumers didn't see much benefit from that. The "last mile" of wires that connected consumers to those new network services were built for a different era. Replacing them required house-by-house restringing with new wires by construction workers and networking specialists. Needless to say it required a heavy investment. Pundits termed it the "Last Mile" problem.

What's the "First Mile" problem then?

Read the rest at Scott's Havard Management blog, Innovation Insights.

On Tuesday, I attended the Front End of Innovation conference in Amsterdam. It was good to see innovation leaders from a wide range of companies in attendance — to me it was a small but important sign of an increasingly stable global economy. 

I provided a few thoughts in the morning, and then heard a fascinating presentation from Patrick O'Riordan — global director of innovation at Anheuser-Busch InBev. Here are some of his lessons for innovators:

Explain strategic objectives in simple terms. AB InBev is the world's largest beer company. Its strategic objectives are to increase SOB (share of beer) and SOT (share of throat). It can achieve these objectives by getting consumers to switch to its products, consume its products in new locations, or attract new consumers. I'm guessing that the simple and immediately memorable language brings great clarity to AB InBev's innovation efforts. Importantly, it clarifies things that InBev won't do, which is an overlooked innovation enabler.

Have defined types of innovation strategies. Patrick described two basic innovation strategies. "Renovations" involve strengthening existing product lines through new marketing campaigns or mild formulation changes. "Innovations" involve completely new products. Patrick noted that you needed both. As he said, "You wouldn't add an extension to your house if your foundation was crumbling."

Again, I bet you most people in AB InBev could recite these strategic choices easily. My experience suggests that clarity about strategic intent helps to spur productive dialogues around innovation.

Have a clear but robust innovation process. AB InBev breaks innovation into a front-end process — which involves consumer discovery work, idea formulation, idea qualification, and so on — and a back-end process. The front-end process doesn't have fixed stage gates given its "fuzzy" and iterative nature. The back-end process is, appropriately, more rigid.

Draw insight from non-obvious places. Patrick showed a slide describing the evolution of the Apple iPod. Clearly Apple isn't in the beverage industry. But the point was that Apple followed a clear platform strategy that mixed line extensions, new product forms, and supporting services, which allowed the company to realize the full potential of the iPod. Patrick described how AB InBev similarly seeks to develop beverage platforms.

I think the message of clarity that comprises AB InBev's innovation efforts is well worth remembering.

• The Promise (and Perils) of Open Collaboration by Andrea Gabor | Strategy + Business

  Article looks to the quality movement for clues as to how open innovation, particularly open collaboration, can find wider adoption and greater success.

• Is This the Light Bulb of the Future? by Eric A. Taub | NYTimes.com's Gadgetwise Blog

  Phillips is the first company to enter the U.S. Department of Energy's $10 million contest to create a viable LED-based alternative to a 60-watt light bulb. Article discusses how the DOE plans to use the contest to come up with a technology that will address the faults of the launch of CFL bulbs.

• InnoCentive: A Market for Ideas | The Economist

  Discusses the initial success of Innocentive's partnership with the charitable Rockefeller Foundation to use Innocentive's approach to help solve problems posted by non-profits working in poor countries.

• Netflix Awards $1 Million Prize and Starts a New Contest by Steve Lohr | NYTimes.com's Bits Blog

  Article details the collaborative nature of the Netflix contest whose goal was to identify technology to better predict movie matches among users: "The way teams came together, especially late in the contest, and the improved results that were achieved suggest that this kind of Internet-enabled approach, known as crowdsourcing, can be applied to complex scientific and business challenges."

• Tips on Innovation & Entrepreneurship From Jeff Bezos by Om Malik | GigaOm blog

  Comments from on innovation an entrepreurship from Amazon's founder during a recent interview, such as "The trick to being an entrepreneur is to know when to be stubborn and when to be flexible: Be stubborn about the vision, but flexible about tactics."

• Innovation Perspectives for August, by multiple authors | Blogging Innovation

  Roundup of blog posts by six authors answering the question, "please describe the importance of innovation strategy to the success of an organization's innovation efforts."

• The 21 Heroes of Data Visualization by Maria Popova | BusinessWeek

  Slide show of interesting and inspiring visualizations of data sets by top designers illustrates the value of pattern-seeking.

• The New, Faster Face of Innovation by By Erik Brynjolfsson and Michael Schrage | MIT Sloan Management Review via Wall Street Journal

  Article on the ramifications of technology that makes innovation initiatives both speedier and cheaper to produce. Will this result in more disruptive innovation or will companies still be tempted to speed up incremental innovations?

   

When making a pitch for your idea be sure to describe how the business will become big and be specific in your ask.

Shark Tank is an adaption of the Japanese television show Dragon’s Den, which gives entrepreneurs the chance to pitch their plans to venture capitalists (“the sharks”) with the goal of securing investments to pursue their ideas.

The show provides useful lessons to not only aspiring entrepreneurs but to any innovator who needs to pitch a new product idea to their bosses for continued exploration.

When we conduct workshops at Innosight we have teams present their ideas in short pitches answering the following questions, much like on the show.

1. What problem are you solving for consumers?
2. What is your idea?
3. What is the business? How will you make money?
4. What specifically are you asking for?

People in our workshops and people on the show do quite well on the first two questions. They have personal stories of how they identified the needs (or Jobs) in the marketplace and have creative and compelling presentations of their ideas (songs, prototypes, samples).

The area where we have seen the biggest room for improvement is in the third area, demonstrating how they will make money and make the business big. The “Sharks” (and your bosses) want to see that there is real interest from customers in the innovation and a clear path to develop a big business. Questions you should be prepared to answer are:

• Do you have sales? How many units have you sold?
• How do you know people are interested in this product?
• Who is the customer? How much do you expect them to pay?
• How many stores are you in? Have you shown this to a retailer who said “I like this, I want to sell this”
• How do you know people will buy that?

The other shortfall is not being specific enough in “the ask”. People who ask for money to build the brand so they can then go to trade shows or retailers do not fare well. Whereas people who ask for money to fulfill production for orders they have in place already do well. Be specific. You need to show how what you’re asking for will help build the business and help make them money.

As you pitch your innovation ideas be sure to describe why the business is compelling and make a specific “ask”.  To see the process in action check out the show (Sundays on ABC at 9pm EDT).

Last week Harvard Business Publishing hosted an audio conference on my forthcoming book, The Silver Lining. The 90-minute discussion included some great dialogue with moderator Angelia Herrin and the audience. There were a handful of questions that I didn't get a chance to answer during the course of the discussion that I thought would be generally interesting to readers here.

Q: Why are "defined processes" considered "innovation killers"?

This question refers to a slide that made the case that many of the perceived advantages of big companies are actually quiet innovation killers. As such, a silver linings of today's tough ties is it scarcity will force companies to do what they should have been doing already.

The basic problem is that sharply defined processes can stymie innovation. ...

Read the rest at Scott's Harvard Management blog.