Need for Structured R&D Roadmaps – Daimler Example

Source Daimler
It takes a long time to develop new technologies and integrate them into products. The wired article How Daimler Built the World’s First Self-Driving Semi has a great example:

Daimler, which owns Mercedes-Benz, has been working on autonomous driving for two decades.
…
As amazing as this thing is—it’s a fully autonomous 18-wheeler that works—company execs say it won’t can’t change lanes on its own, it won’t be market-ready for a decade, and could never replace human drivers.

Clearly, developing technologies takes a long time. So successful development needs intermediate productization of technologies.

Much of the technology in the Inspiration—the radars and cameras, the computing power and electrical architecture—has a long track record of commercial use in active safety features like lane departure warning and adaptive cruise control.

Organization structures for nurturing breakthrough technologies

The article Organizing for New Technologies in MIT Sloan review has some interesting thoughts about organization structures necessary to get the most out of emerging technologies. The article starts off by defining and distinguishing invention and innovation:

To understand the challenge, one first needs to recognize the distinction between the new idea (invention) and its subsequent commercialization through a product or service (innovation). This is important because, within established companies, the decision-making processes and logic governing inventions differ significantly from those governing commercialization. Engineering and scientific personnel typically drive inventions within new technological domains, whereas business development and marketing managers drive the subsequent commercialization.

I am not sure if all R&D executives will agree with the definition of innovation, the ideas for organization structures seem to be quite valuable.
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Do Processes and Metrics Kill Innovation?

Many of the organizations we have visited often have the discussion about innovation vs. structure. The thought is that if we enforce processes and metrics on innovation, we will cripple it. The post Does Structure Kill Creativity? – K.L.Wightman lays out some interesting thoughts:

There are 26 letters in the alphabet and 12 notes in a musical scale, yet there are infinite ways to create a story and a song. Writing is like a science experiment: structure is the control, creativity is the variable.

Procter & Gamble: Mastering the Art of the Innovation Tournament

Knowledge@Wharton has an interesting article Procter & Gamble: Mastering the Art of the Innovation Tournament. P&G CEO has set up a great challenge for the company (A great way to foster innovation is for the leader to create or emphasize challenges):

Procter & Gamble CEO Bob McDonald is a man with a plan. Last year, he and his company declared a bold vision — one that includes making all products and packaging with recycled or renewable materials, and ensuring that no waste from P&G products touches a landfill. Prominent in the vision, too, is powering all plants with renewable energy. Because all of this will take decades to achieve, P&G also declared a series of shorter-term, 10-year goals to guarantee that the company is making progress. The 2020 renewable energy goal is to power 30% of P&G’s energy needs for 180 plants worldwide with renewable sources.

Interesting: the no waste recyclable product idea became accessing renewable electricity. The challenge could have been used to drive P&G engineers to develop new innovative renewable products… Anyway, the energy problem was solved by an Innovation Tournament. I am not sure if accessing renewable energy can be counted as innovation, but there are some interesting lessons in the article.

First: P&G defined a narrow scope for the brainstorming (innovation tournament). This would help focus the discussion and help generate more useful results.

Second, P&G involved both internal and external experts in the brainstorming. There were more internal participants than external. Hopefully, this would get more internal buy-in to ideas and ease the transition of external ideas into practice.

Instead of a far-flung event like X-Prize, P&G chose a more controlled process, inviting seven external experts to propose and brainstorm solutions with a team of 20 internal experts. Common among corporations that need to protect proprietary information, this format also made sense in P&G’s case “because a lot of it was about process innovation,” says Favaloro. “We wanted to engage people in an ongoing process that involves interaction between internal and external teams. They needed to be steeped in the process itself, instead of the next big widget.”

Third, everyone was asked to do preparatory work before the brainstorming sessions. This not only increased the quality of ideas, but also ensured external experts’ discussion was more relevant to company needs:

Moreover, significant spadework at the outset resulted in a fast-paced, productive final round in late July. To start, P&G’s internal teams delivered in-depth briefs via webinar to bring the external experts up to speed on the plants so they could frame more workable, tailored recommendations. Then the outside experts submitted 150 ideas, which the internal and external teams together winnowed to 45 via online voting. By the time the groups met in person, “it was a supercharged environment,” says Favaloro. “Everyone was up on the problem and had already worked on it independently.” Adds Stefano Zenezini, P&G’s family care product supply vice president: “One hour into the discussion, [and] you’re already discovering new things.”

Fourth, a very broad set of experts were selected that could represent a wide variety of perspectives (e.g a public policy expert and a project finance expert):

From this discussion came one of the biggest differences in perspective between the external and internal teams. External finance expert Gardner suggested that P&G should add utility-sized renewable power projects to its portfolio. “Their overall electricity demand is 800 megawatts worldwide,” says Gardner. “At each plant, if you have less than five megawatts of renewable energy potential, that’s not significant enough to move the needle to 30% renewable energy at each plant. You could get 25% of your goal with one few-hundred megawatt wind project.”

Fifth and final point, there was enough time allocated to follow through and have detailed discussions about new ideas:

The P&G team was intrigued enough to ask for more information, and Gardner spent the first evening of the tournament preparing a presentation on project finance for the next day. From the presentation, it was clear that new approaches could be beneficial, in particular for large projects.

Pretty good addition to the checklist for my next brainstorming session!

Seven steps to better brainstorming

McKinsey Quarterly has a list of Seven steps to better brainstorming. Clearly, Ideation is important and difficult to do well.

From R&D groups seeking pipelines of innovative new products to ops teams probing for time-saving process improvements to CEOs searching for that next growth opportunity—all senior managers want to generate better and more creative ideas consistently in the teams they form, participate in, and manage.

The article is a good read with great examples and explanations. Below is a quick summary of the steps:

Know your organization’s decision making criteria: Even though it is good to think outside-the-box, if the idea is going to be rejected by the culture anyway, it probably should not be pursued.
Ask the right questions: I can personally vouch for this one. It is better to be focused on a particular question rather than brainstorm on any broad topic. People come up with ideas that are far too diverse to follow through (Step 7 below)
Choose the right people
Divide and conquer: Divide into sub-teams
On your mark, set and go: Orient people before they divide into sub-teams (based on 2)
Wrap it up: Do not choose the top ideas during the brainstorming session. End the session on a high note. I will have to think about this one.
Follow up promptly: Many a brainstorming sessions have failed because of lack of follow through. I have been part of several of these. I think that the root cause of the lack of follow through may be step 1 and 2 above.

Alternate approach to aid brainstorming

HBR had an interesting article about brainstorming in My Eureka Moment With Strategy – Roger Martin:

Rather than have them talk about what they thought was true, ask them to specify what would have to be true for the option on the table to be a fantastic choice. It was magic. Clashing views turned into collaboration on really understanding the logic of the options.”
Why is it so important? The central reason is that it allows managers to step back from their beliefs and contemplate the possibility that they might not be entirely correct.

I really like this approach and am going to try it out in my next brainstorming meeting. What has your experience been?

If you think an idea is the wrong way to approach a problem and someone asks you if you think it’s the right way, you’ll reply “no” and defend that answer against all comers. But if someone asks you to figure out what would have to be true for that approach to work, your frame of thinking changes. No one is asking you to take a stand on the idea, just to focus on what would have to be true for that idea to work. This subtle shift gives people a way to back away from their beliefs and allow exploration by which they give themselves the opportunity to learn something new.

Ideation Tools for Your Mobile

ZDNet has a list of ideation and idea management tools for different mobile tools. Some of them are even free. I think it is great that we can capture ideas any where and queue them up for discussion.

The new clients all come as part of the innovation management platform provided by Spigit, Kindling, and just yesterday, Imaginatik, Each let’s you suggest and evaluate ideas, but in slightly different ways.

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Brightidea Mobile Back in February, BrightIdea announced it’s mobile client for the iPhone and iPad as well as Android devices. With BrightIdea Mobile, users can view, post, comment, vote, and share ideas. They can also use Brightidea’s corporate micro-blogging feature to post and follow activity within their innovation community.

I find interesting how Innovation has become a favorite buzz word. The title of the article “4 Innovation Management Tools for Your Mobile.” I think there is a great deal of hard work between discussing ideas and developing innovative new products. I guess in my book, innovation is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration!

Innovation vs. Group Think

Here is a really cool article from the Knowledge @ Wharton. It deals with one of the major problems with any brainstorming event – Group Think. They propose a new concept called Hybrid Brainstorming:
The key with innovation is not to get as many ideas as possible, but to get some exceptional ideas that can be game changers. Any process that equalizes all the ideas contributed by everyone will be counter to the objectives of the brainstorming. So the goal is to strike this delicate balance between being inclusive and looking for exceptional ideas. Check out the article. It has some interesting thoughts.

Terwiesch, Ulrich and co-author Karan Girotra, a professor of technology and operations management at INSEAD, found that a hybrid process — in which people are given time to brainstorm on their own before discussing ideas with their peers — resulted in more and better quality ideas than a purely team-oriented process. More importantly for companies striving for innovation, however, the trio says the absolute best idea in a hybrid process topped the Number One suggestion in a traditional model.