From digital disruption to SaaS solution at The Washington Post: A Shailesh Prakash perspective

It was a pleasure to have my classmate Shailesh Prakash, EVP & CIO at The Washington Post, give a guest lecture in my class at IIM Bangalore a few months ago. “Amazon unbound” author Brad Stone calls Shailesh Jeff Bezos’ technology partner at The Post. When Bezos acquired The Post in 2013, Shailesh and his team were developing a content management system called Arc Publishing to manage functions like online publishing, blogging, podcasting, advertising, and e-commerce. By the time Shailesh addressed us last August, Arc was supporting 1.5 billion user transactions per month and powering 1500 sites across 24 countries. It has become a separate business division with 300 employees offering a SaaS (Software as a Service) product to clients like Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Toronto Globe and Mail, and some of the leading newspapers in Spain, France, New Zealand, etc.

The key question Shailesh explored through his interaction with students is – How does a newspaper company founded in 1877, focussed on excellence in journalism, having a little bit of chip on the shoulder, with the brand and the success that has come along the way then end up offering a SaaS product which is now with every large newspaper and many broadcasters? It was an excellent primer on how intrapreneurship can happen in an established legacy business. Here are a few highlights from his talk:

The digital disruption at the publishing industry: Shailesh began by telling us that at one point, newspapers like The Post were monopolies, owned railroads, paper mills, printing plants, logistics and supply chains, and much more. And they were very profitable delivering 2 editions every single day with deep and wide moats. However, over the last twenty years, the Internet and subsequently mobile revolution disrupted the industry. Many newspapers made the mistake of offering the content for free on the web and couldn’t sustain the business based on advertisements. Many newspapers went out of business.

Excellence in journalism and engineering: The first step in this journey, according to Shailesh, was to accept that excellence in journalism is not enough. Google, Apple, and Amazon have spoilt the consumers and they are demanding speed, beauty, and ease of access in whatever they consume. The Post had to become excellent in the other dimension - design, product, technology, and engineering in order to attract and retain its consumers. With this realization, Shailesh was hired by Don Graham, the erstwhile owner of The Post, and given the task of making the newspaper digital-friendly. With the arrival of Bezos, this initiative got accelerated further and the culture was infused with the spirit of experimentation.

Crawl, walk, run story of Arc: “It’s not that we had everything figured out,” said Shailesh, “and then we did marketing and boom!” The journey has been relatively fast but very incremental. The first step was to say that the content management system can be built in-house and doesn’t have to be bought from outside. Once some aspects of the stack were built, Shailesh got curious as to whether it can be delivered as a SaaS solution. So it was offered for free to some university newspapers like the University of Maryland, Yale, Columbia, New York University, University of Southern California, etc. The idea was to learn what it takes to run a multi-tenant architecture. Could it be ensured that the content of Yale is not seen by the student journalists in Columbia? What is the cost of running such a solution?

The next step was to offer it to a small newspaper and get paid for it. The newspaper was trying to support blogging on their site and that worked. The next step was Toronto Globe and Mail – a big newspaper in Canada. They were willing to partner at an early stage of the product development and were interested in influencing the roadmap. This was the first time two large newspapers – The Post and Toronto Globe were simultaneously using the product.

And slowly, other papers like LA Times and then broadcasters started to come in. Once supporting online subscriptions became an important feature of the platform the commerce piece, payment gateway mechanisms had to be worked out. Were there non-believers? Of course, there were. Even analysts and respected journalists were skeptical of this “side business”. Fortunately, the parent company of The Post went private during this phase and that helped. Over the years, the journalist mix in the newsroom has changed too. It now has a number of TikTok savvy native digital journalists. Now, questions like “How does one deliver stories with speed and still stay true to the brand?” have become important.

As major competitors of The Post started to come in as customers, the business agreements and associated liabilities especially for data breaches started to become nuanced. Mutual Funds wanted an ISO audit. All this pushed the boundaries for the technologists but it also meant building competence on the legal, finance, and consulting sides.

Overall, it was an enriching experience. Thanks, Shailesh for sharing your insights! I learned a lot and I am sure students did too. Wishing Arc a successful trajectory ahead!

As Jeff Bezos says, are big ideas incredibly easy to identify?

In a recent interview, Amazon Founder Jeff Bezos made following statement (18:22): “The main job of a senior leader is to identify 2 or 3 important ideas and then to enforce great execution against those big ideas. And the good news is, the big ideas are usually incredibly easy to identify.” For anyone who has dabbled in innovation, this may sound like a strange statement. If identification of big ideas is really that simple, why isn’t everybody running with one? Is there a catch here? Or, was Bezos just joking? Let’s explore this in this article.

Here is the context. Bezos is answering the question, “Can you predict what Amazon will look like ten years from now?” He first points out that the observable Amazon could change quite a bit. Nobody could have predicted ten years ago that Amazon Web Services (AWS) would be a significant contributor to Amazon business. Then he mentions that hopefully the core approach involving customer obsession, willingness to invent and long term view (patience & accepting failures as a path to success) would remain the same. This is where he makes the statement that big ideas are incredibly easy to identify.

What are the three big ideas for Amazon consumer business? They are: Low prices, fast delivery and vast selection. Of course, that’s the dream of any retailer. And it’s known for a long time. Bezos stresses that “big ideas should be obvious.” Now, let’s de-layer this a bit.

First, let’s notice that when Bezos spells out these ideas, they get presented as questions. E.g. How do we always deliver things a little faster? How do we reduce our cost structure so that we can reduce our prices lower? etc. So what Bezos refers to as big ideas in this context, are actually big challenges. In fact, I would call them strategic challenges. And as Bezos says, they are usually stable over time. He is also quick to add following caveat: It is hard to maintain a firm grasp on the obvious at all times. Little things can distract from the obvious.   

I have been talking to senior leaders for the past decade. And I am not convinced that they know what their big challenges are. Or at least they haven’t been able to articulate them in a clear manner.  Perhaps, Bezos is right. Every senior leader knows the big challenges. However, the caveat, the little distractions, is creating a cloud of confusion. And leader is losing focus on the strategic challenges. I don’t know. What do you think?

Five minutes innovation manager

In my innovation workshops with managers, one challenge that shows up consistently is that of “no time”. Managers genuinely feel that their plate is full and they find it difficult to get time to do additional activities that might enable innovation in their teams. As a response to this situation, I started facilitating a short exercise a few years back which I call “Five minutes innovation manager”. The idea of this exercise is to suggest that you don’t have to dedicate a lot of time for innovation, just five minutes a week is enough. There are always a few participants in each session for whom this is the key takeaway.  What can you do in five minutes to enable innovation? Let’s explore in this article.

Here is what I tell the participants: Suppose you have to budget five minutes of your time every week to foster innovation in your team. What would you do? Mention What, When and Where. Their responses can be put into following categories:

1.      Publicize a challenge-book: One of the most effective interventions is to identify your team’s topmost challenge and write it in a prominent place – say the whiteboard in your office, the wall in your corridor, or the intranet page of your team. And do nothing else. A challenge which gets due attention has a life of its own. You can also solicit challenges from your team members which you can collate and publicize.

2.      Listen to ideas: You can budget five minutes a week to listen to at least one idea / proposal from one of your team members. If nobody comes to you, you can walk around and poke them. Make sure you don’t look at the watch while the team member is talking about her idea. Listening is hard, especially for managers. One response which helps the idea authors is, “Good idea, show me a demo.”

3.      Solicit ideas: In your weekly team meeting, you can dedicate five minutes for brainstorming on a specific challenge. You will be surprised how many ideas get generated in five minutes.

4.      Appreciate the effort: It doesn’t take much time to mention in the team meeting that you appreciate a prototype built (or demo shown) by one of the team members or a blog or white paper written by someone.  It can send a subtle message that these activities are appreciated.

You might think that activities like these done in five minutes may not make much of a difference. But you won’t know this until you try. Once you realize that it is not so difficult and doesn’t eat too much of your bandwidth, you may extend the time.

This method is inspired by a chapter called “Shrink the change” in the book “Switch” by Chip and Dan Heath. The Heath brothers give several examples to illustrate that a five minute regime can go a long way bringing about a change.

Why don’t you give it a shot and see?

Organizational Innovation Ecosystem: A re-look after five years

It has been over five years since I first wrote about various elements of an organizational innovation ecosystem (see the picture above). In this half a decade I got opportunities to meet people from several dozen organizations – from various types such as for-profit, not-for-profit, Government, NGO etc. What did I find? Which elements seem to be in place? Which elements are hard to find? Which elements would I replace today? And which new ones might I add? Let’s explore in this article.

Let’s start with those elements which organizations serious about innovation seem to be putting in place:

·      

• Idea management process: Many organizations are making serious efforts in improving their idea management process. Some are also trying to bring various disjoint processes under one broad umbrella – e.g. kaizen, Quality circle, Idea portal, R&D, Internal VC process etc.
• Rewards & Innovation day: HR department has been playing a role in putting rewards & recognition process in place. I got an opportunity to visit the stalls put up on the innovation day in organizations like Titan.
• Training programs: L&D department has been playing a key role in rolling out training programs that raise awareness on innovation.
• Laboratory & corporate venture fund: In terms of structures, I see investments in labs and even in putting a corporate venture fund together.

Now, let’s turn to areas where there are challenges:

• Challenge process: Taking ownership of top business challenges and keeping them alive in a challenge book is something that I don’t see much. Managers who take up this role of owning one or more key business challenges are called champions in our book “8 steps to innovation”. A live and prioritized challenge book can bring focus to innovation efforts. It might also contribute to the strategy.
• Success stories: Like Master Shifu follows a bright spot to train Kung Fu Panda, there is an opportunity in digging deeper the success stories and finding scalable approaches. Unfortunately, managers are so busy with problems, that they don’t have time for studying the bright spots – be it the people who give ideas regularly, prototyping etc.
• Partnership network: This is perhaps the toughest asset to build and manage. It takes years and very few people have the patience to look that far. However, it is an extremely potent asset for building innovation capacity.

Any new element I would add today? Perhaps an element titled “innovation sandbox” – structures where experimentation capacity is massively increased in a specific area. Also I would replace the element “Immersive Research” with a more commonly used term “Design Thinking”. And replace “Success stories” with “Bright spot focus”. (See the updated picture below).

Overall, I still feel that the ecosystem view can provide a useful perspective while building innovation capacity systematically.

Infinite vision and the questions that shaped Aravind Eye Care system

India is a land of paradoxes. On the one hand, we have sixty people losing sight in an eye camp and thirteen women losing life in a sterilization camp in the last two months. On the other hand, we have Aravind Eye Care system – overlooking 1000+ sight-restoring surgeries every day with world class quality standards, serving poor and rich with compassion, and in a financially self-sustainable way.

The canvass that Aravind covers is so vast that any narrative that tries to present Aravind story will be incomplete. But some are less incomplete than others. “Infinite Vision: How Aravind became the wold’s greatest business case for compassion” by Pavithra Mehta and Suchitra Shenoy is perhaps the least incomplete and lucidly written tale of Aravind, its founder Dr. Venkataswamy and many others who shaped the infinite vision. Here are two things that I found most interesting in the book.

1.      Questions behind the answers: If Aravind is the extraordinary answer, what were Dr. V’s questions? This is the core riddle the book aims to address. Through the personal journal Dr. V kept over the decades, the authors get a peek into the questions. “How to organize and build more hospitals like McDonald’s”. Reads a journal entry from 1980s. Notice that there is no question mark (?) at the end of the sentence, a peculiar characteristic of Dr. V’s writing. It is as though each question contains a seed of the answer. Another entry reads - “How was Buddha able to organize in those days a religion that millions follow. Who were the leaders. How were they shaped.” At Frankfort airport Dr. V watched a plane land and the process that followed and said to his friend, “This is how we should run our operating theatre.” In 1978, Dr. V visited 40,000 square-foot training facility at University of Michigan School of Medicine. After seeing the training centre, he mentioned to Dr. Suzanne Gilbert, “One day, I would like to have a centre like this one.” She was baffled by this remark of the Indian doctor who at that time ran an 11-bed eye clinic.

2.      Light behind the spirit: Dr. V was deeply influenced by the teachings of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. The spiritual quest got translated into questions like – How do I become a perfect instrument? (1980 journal entry). The book beautifully weaves the thread of Dr. V’s spiritual journey towards becoming a perfect instrument in the narrative. However, a question arises - What did it mean on a day-to-day basis to Dr. V? Following excerpt from a journal entry gives a glimpse:

You feel drawn to a patient because he’s from your village, known to you, and then you try to do your best for him. But at times, a patient is aggressive and demands some privileges. He says, “Could you see me first?” This upsets you, and with that feeling of annoyance you treat him. You are not able to disassociate him from his mental or emotional aggressiveness. … To do this [treat him well] you must bring into your own being silence, calmness, and quietude. It needs enormous practice to realize the experience of silence in you.

“This man’s spirituality wasn’t incidental to the story. It was what everything else hinged on,” says Prof. V. Kasturi Rangan of Harvard Business School who wrote the case on Aravind that became popular world over.

Personally, “Can spirituality be integrated in organizations?” is a question I have carried with me for some time now. The book gives a ray of hope. Kudos to Pavithra and Suchitra for bringing out such a wonderful story. Hope it reaches out to more people.

I would like to thank Mr. Thulsi for giving a copy of the book to me. He is playing a key role at Aravind in shaping the “Infinite vision” and inspiring many.

Book image source: flipkart.com. 

3 lessons innovation leaders can learn from the iPod story

Walter Isaacson begins chapter 30 of the biography Steve Jobs titled “The Digital Hub” with a “What next?” workshop Jobs facilitated in 2001 where iPod idea got a push. However, as we read further into the chapter, we come across various events that influenced the decision making, shaped the idea and took it forward. Here are 3 lessons I feel innovation leaders (CXO, product managers, Biz heads, VCs) can learn from iPod story:

     1.     Strategic theme (“Digital Hub”): Apple introduced FireWire technology in 1999 that would help transfer video from cameras into iMac fast. The video could then be edited, mixed with music and distributed further. Seeing this Steve Jobs realized, “Using iMovie makes your camcorder ten times more valuable. That’s when it hit me that the personal computer was going to morph into something else.” Jobs would call that “something else” – “Digital Hub”. A side effect of PC becoming a hub was that it would create opportunity for personal devices to become simpler. Note that the source of the insight was an internal "bright spot" (i.e. iMovie-camcorder joint value creation) not a trend discussed externally. Digital hub would soon become the dominant theme during the brainstorms like the one mentioned above. I have facilitated “What next?” workshops for the past several years. Rarely do I come across a team or its leadership with clarity on strategic theme such as “Digital Hub”.

2.     Investment confidence ($10 million check): iTunes software was launched in January 2001. However, Jobs had started pushing for the portal music player idea a few months earlier – in the fall of 2000. At that time, Rubinstein responsible for hardware engineering, told Jobs that the right components were not available yet. During one of his regular supplier visits to Japan in February 2001, Rubinstein came across a tiny 1.8-inch Toshiba hard-drive with 5GB space. Toshiba engineers were not sure what it could be used for. Rubinstein realized its potential use in the portal music player. Fortunately, Jobs was also in Japan giving a keynote at the Tokyo MacWorld conference. That night he met Jobs at the Hotel Okura where Jobs was staying and said, “I know how to do it. All I need is $10 million check.” Jobs immediately authorized it. That was roughly 2.5% of the R&D spend at that time and R&D budget was around 5% of revenue. This demonstrates Steve’s investment confidence – not that easy to find at least in India.

3.     Business plan review (Experimentation focus): “There are certain meetings that are memorable both because they make a historic moment and because they illuminate the way a leader operates.” This is how Isaacson describes the iPod’s proposal review meeting in April 2001. Tony Fadell, a new joinee and a key brain behind iPod was the presenter and in the audience were Jobs, Rubinstein, Schiller (designer), Jonathan Ive (Head of design), Jeff Robbin and marketing director Stan Ng. It was Fadell’s first presentation to Jobs.

Fadell began his presentation with a slide deck on the potential market and existing players and soon realized Steve doesn’t like slides. Steve later told Isaacson, “If you need slides, it shows you don’t know what you’re talking about.” Fadell quit showing the slides and showed the three different models he had brought in to the conference room. Rubinstein had coached him on what order to reveal them so that his preferred choice is shown last and with a bit of suspense. The last mockup option was hidden under a wooden bowl at the center of the table.

Fadell took various parts out of a box and spread them on the table. These includes 1.8-inch drive, LCD screen, boards and batteries all labelled with their cost and weight. This was followed by a discussion around how the prices might come down in the coming year. Some pieces could be put together, like Lego blocks, to show options.

The models were made up of Styrofoam. The first one had a slot for removable memory card, the second one had DRAM memory which was cheap but user could potential lose all songs if battery ran out. Jobs didn’t like both of these models. The final model was shown by lifting the bowl and revealing the fully assembled model of 1.8-inch drive. Next Schiller demonstrated the trackwheel through a few models. Jobs shouted, “That’s it!” The decision was made and Fadell & co got working on the project immediately.

Fadell recalls, “I was used to being at Philips, where decision like this would take meeting after meeting with a lot of PowerPoint presentations and going back for more study.”

As an innovation leader ask yourself: (1) Do I have any strategic insight like the “PC as a Digital Hub”? (2) Am I willing to write a “$10 million check” for the strategic initiative when a “Rubinstein” shows up? (3) Can we emphasize experimentation (prototyping) in the business plan review over PowerPoint projections?

Source: Primary source of the story is chapter 30 of Walter Isaasson's biography Steve Jobs. Image source: en.wikipedia.org.
“Apple’s R&D spending hits bottom as percentage of revenue” by Larry Dignan, ZDNet.com, October 17, 2011. (has a table that gives Apple’s R&D as a percentage of revenue since 2000).

At 41, Fritz Schumacher learns how to think

Economist Fritz Schumacher is famous for his bestseller “Small is beautiful: A study of economics as if people mattered” first published in 1973. His daughter and biographer Barbara Wood has titled chapter 16 of his biography Alias Papa: A life of Fritz Schumacher, “Learning how to think”. Schumacher wrote to his parents in 1953, “I have a feeling that I will look back to my forty first year as a turning point for the rest of my life.” The transformation was so dramatic that within a short time rational & scientific thinking Schumacher was writing to his mother asking for the exact time of his birth so that his friend can create his horoscope. What happened? How exactly did his thinking change? Let’s see in this article.

For the first two decades of his career, Schumacher was paid to think. In 1953, he was employed by National Coal Board in England as an Economic Advisor. His primary job was to study the demand & supply of energy and recommend policy changes. As a rational thinker he would consider any argument not based on facts as sub-standard. Intellect was his primary weapon and he took the job of sharpening the weapon very seriously. It meant tracking facts and figures, reading & commenting on theories from Marxism to Keynesianism and making predictions and policy recommendations. However, his faith in his intellect was to get shaken permanently in his forty-first year.

The seed was sown in a rather harmless activity – gardening. Schumacher bought a house in Caterham in 1950 and began his experiments with organic methods in his garden. He joined the Coal Board gardening club and Soil Association. Their message was simple: look after the soil and the plants will look after themselves. He got up at 6am to work in his garden before he left for office and he worked at his compost after he returned from his office. Barbara Wood notes - His acceptance of organic approach rather than the conventional chemical approach was an act of faith. It had opened door to other acts of faith. Like which ones?

During his forty minutes train journey from Caterham to Victoria (NCB Headquarters), Schumacher read on varied topics. This included Indian and Chinese Philosophy. These guys, so called spiritual gurus, were also offering solutions to the questions that bothered him – like “How to prevent wars?” However, their approach was diametrically opposite. Instead of looking at structural changes or policy changes, they identified the root cause as the “crisis of human consciousness”. In fact, this approach regarded intellect as a hindrance in resolving the crisis. This was a “bombshell” for Schumacher because everything he regarded as sacred was being questioned. 

During this time, Schumacher was introduced to the teachings of George Gurdjieff, a spiritual master. On weekends Schumacher participated in a Gurdjieff study group. The group learnt to meditate among other things. Meditation was hard for Schumacher. He wrote to his mother, “I fear that it will be more difficult for me than many others, because I have depended on the intellect to such an extent that it now tries to push itself into the forefront at every opportunity.”  In April 1953 Fritz wrote to his mother, “The crux of the matter – is the method of allowing a deep inner stillness and calmness to enter – a stillness not only of the body, but also of thoughts and feelings. Through this one gains extraordinary strength and happiness.”  

It was the beginning of a new type of thinking that stops flaunting the intellect as the most powerful weapon the man possesses.

Story of Gandhi’s 1920 Charkha challenge: A critical look

Vinoba Bhave carried an experiment for a year in 1916 in Nalwadi, Wardha to check the earning productivity of charkha spinning¹. He concluded that the maximum earning per day of a person cannot be more than two annas. Gandhi realized that this had to be significantly more. Hence, he announced an open challenge to design an improved charkha in 1920. How was the response to this challenge? What kind of ideas came? What was the outcome? To study this, I spent some time going through the Young India issues of 1920 at the archive section of Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad last July. In this article I will summarize the story first and then review the process of managing the challenge based on the 4 parameters Prof. Karl Ulrich of Wharton School has articulated in the book “Innovation tournament”.

4 ways to improve the performance of innovation tournaments

Organizing contests to generate a blockbuster idea or a few best ideas is not a novel concept. You may be familiar with campaigns such as GE’s ecomagination challenge or Economic Times’ “Power of Ideas”. Similarly idea campaigns have been an integral part of innovation programs of various organizations including Cognizant, Intuit, Titan etc. Question is: How do you ensure or at least increase the chance of getting a blockbuster idea through such a campaign? What are the levers that improve the performance of idea campaigns? Prof. Karl Ulrich of Wharton School calls such campaigns innovation tournaments. He along with Prof. Christian Terwiesch (also of Wharton) has written a book titled “Innovation tournament: Creating and selecting exceptional opportunities” that addresses these questions. In this article, let’s look at the 4 levers from the book that Ulrich presents in the Wharton lecture shown above. First let’s start with a definition of innovation tournament.

3 things Mike Markkula did as a champion of “Apple Computer” idea

“The new idea either finds a champion or dies” goes a saying. Well, let’s test it. Did Steve Jobs, the “God of marketing”, need a champion for his “Apple Computer” idea? He did! In fact, Mike Markkula, the person who first championed the idea, played a significant role as a mentor to Jobs in the initial years. “Mike really took me under his wing,” Jobs has mentioned in his biography. What exactly did Mike do? Let’s look at three things in this article.

By the time Mike visited Steve Jobs and his partner Steve Wozniak in Jobs’ garage in the fall of 1976, the duo had already formed a partnership company named “Apple Computer”, had sold almost a hundred Apple I computers and made a profit and had designed a sleeker and improved version – Apple II. The problem was that Apple needed $200,000 to go into production. They had no credibility to raise the money. Their proposal had been turned down by Bushnell of Atari (Jobs’ ex-employer), Chuck Peddle of Commodore (potential competitor) and Don Valentine (founder of Sequoia Capital). “If you want me to finance you,” Valentine told Steve Jobs, “you need to have one person who understands marketing and distribution and can write a business plan.” Mike Markkula turned out to be that person.

Vision & business plan: At age 33 Mike was a millionaire after selling his stock options at Intel after it went public and was practically retired. He got impressed by seeing Apple II demo. He proposed to Jobs that they write a business plan together. “If it comes out well, I’ll invest,” Markkula said, “and if not, you’ve got a few weeks of my time for free.” Jobs took the offer and spent several evenings and some nights at Markkula’s house. For all practical purposes, it was Markkula who wrote the business plan. Markkula expanded Apple vision to go beyond hobbyist market. He visualized that personal computers will be used by “regular people in regular homes, doing things like keeping track of your favourite recipes or balancing your checkbook.”

Investment: At the end of the business plan exercise, Mike was convinced that Apple is a great idea. In fact, he said, “We are going to be a Fortune 500 company in two years.” It took Apple seven years to get there. But more importantly, Mike offered a line of credit of up to $250,000 in return of being made a one-third equity participant. It is interesting to see what Jobs thought of Mike’s investment at that time. Jobs recalls, “I thought it was unlikely that Mike would ever see that $250,000 again, and I was impressed that he was willing to risk it.”

Marketing philosophy: Markkula wrote a one-pager titled “The Apple Marketing Philosophy”. It had three things. The first was empathy, an intimate connection with the feelings of the customer. “We will truly understand their needs better than any other company.” The second was focus: “In order to do a good job of those things we decide to do, we must eliminate all of the unimportant opportunities.” The third was impute: “People DO judge a book by its cover. We may have the best product, the highest quality, the most useful software etc.; if we present them in a slipshod manner, they will be perceived as slipshod; if we present them in a creative manner, we will impute the desired qualities.”

“When you open the box of an iPhone or iPad, we want that tactile experience to set the tone for how you perceive the product,” Jobs says in the biography, “Mike taught me that.”

Source:

Isaacson, Walter, “Steve Jobs”, Little Brown, 2011, chapter 5 (Apple I) and chapter 6 (Apple II).

Photo source: www.mac-history.net

Highlights of “Going beyond jugaad”: A 3-day program on innovation management at IIMB

Like last year, Prof. Rishikesha T Krishnan, Prof. S Rajeev and I facilitated a 3-day workshop on innovation management at IIM Bangalore on Oct 15-17. It was titled: Going beyond jugaad: Building a systematic innovation capability. Participants came from Ahmedabad, Chennai, Gurgaon, Hyderabad, Lucknow, Mumbai, Pune, Thiruvananthapuram and of course, Bangalore. They represented IT (products & services), ITeS, Banking, Automotive and Construction service industries. Their designations varied from Technical Director, GM, DGM, Sr Staff Engineer, Senior Program Manager, Director etc.  It was nice to have PSU representation this time.

Following picture captures the framework we used in exploring various topics related to innovation management. It included: business strategy, its relationship to innovation strategy and specific “how to” practices relevant for improving idea pipeline, velocity and batting average.

We were fortunate to have two guest speakers. Mr. L R Natarajan, COO, New Business, Titan presented an overview of innovation journey at Titan over the past decade. Gopal Devanahalli,VP, Infosys presented strategy, roadmap and challenges of Products & Platforms division of Infosys. We also had a panel discussion on creative problem solving methodologies. Our panellists were Dr. Bala Ramadurai (co-Founder TRIZ Innovation India), Lakshman Pachineela Seshadri (Head, Innovation at SAP Global Delivery and visiting faculty at D-school, Potsdam, Germany) and Raghu Kolli, a Design Thinking expert.

Finally we had participants present status, learnings and actions they planned take back. Here is a summary of participant take-away.

Related articles:

Beyond jugaad: A summary of current practices and participant takeaways in managing innovation, Nov 6, 2011 (My blog on last year’s program highlights)

4 levers of building experimentation capacity

If you want to promote a culture of innovation, you will need to build experimentation capacity. How do you do it? Well, here are 4 levers you might want to consider.

Right to experiment (RTE): If nobody in the organization has a permission to experiment, then there is no hope for any innovation. Right to experiment (RTE) is a foundation principle on which innovation capacity is built. Many times “RTE” is considered synonymous with Google’s 20% rule or 3M’s 15% rule. According to this rule, every employee can spend up to 15 or 20% of his time working on his own experiments.

I see 2 issues equating RTE with a policy such as Google 20%. One, RTE doesn’t have to be granted to everybody like in Google. It can very well be granted to only those whose idea is passed through a first level of screening or to those belonging to specific departments (or some other policy suitable to your culture). Second, putting a policy in place doesn’t guarantee RTE will be exercised in the organization. For example, Jaruhar, an innovator from Indian Railways, discovered for the first time that he has the permission to experiment when he became member (Engineering) of the Board. By then Jaruhar must have put in a couple of decades of experience in Indian Railways. That’s awfully long time for smart guys like Jaruhar to start experimenting.

You may be a great experimenter and yet as a leader you may not realize the importance of RTE. For example see how Mahatma Gandhi’s view on RTE evolved over the years. Ask yourself: Who has the right to experiment here? Who is actually experimenting? How are we encouraging it?

Laboratory: It is not enough to have the RTE. You need to create a space which gives legitimacy to experimentation & failure – just like a meditation room may give legitimacy to silence. Most of the time, the space is physical which also fosters collaborations. However, sometimes it can also be virtual – e.g. on the cloud. Thomas Edison said, “To invent, you need good imagination and a pile of junk.” A good laboratory makes the junk “useful”. In Ideo, the person looking after a laboratory is called curator. A good laboratory wears past failures with pride on its chest. When a laboratory is accessible to a lot of people, it can build a huge capacity. Perhaps that is why Galileo smiled in spite of his telescope fiasco. Sometimes a laboratory can also be mobile so that it can reach people who don’t have easy access to it. For example, see Agastya Foundation’s efforts in building experimentation capacity in rural schools. Ask yourself, have you created a space for experimentation? Does your lab have adequate tools?

Innovation sandbox: There may be several projects running in a laboratory. However, a time comes when experimentation needs to be focused on a single challenge. What you need is an innovation sandbox – It has focus, massive experimentation capacity and ultra-low cost for each additional experiment. Tata Nano came out of a sandbox. Similarly, Wright brothers created two sandboxes during their flight experiments during 1900-1903. See what happens when a pathology laboratory gets converted into an innovation sandboxfocused on cancer research. Ask yourself, have you built an innovation sandbox?

Open innovation: Procter & Gamble’s connect-and-develop program systematically goes about finding experimentation capacity within P&G’s partnership network. You don’t have to solve all problems internally. Organizations collaborate with academia, Government research labs and with other companies. You can also tap experimenters through open innovation platforms by throwing a challenge and inviting prototypes. To find more about how open innovation challenges work, see the interview of Jayesh Badani, CEO of Ideaken. Ask yourself, have you explored building experimentation capacity beyond your organization?

Open innovation: Ideaken CEO Jayesh Badani shares his experience

We got an opportunity to talk to Jayesh Badani, CEO of Ideaken, a Bangalore based start-up providing an open innovation platform. Jayesh was one of the panellists at Next Gear, a workshop on innovation leadership I facilitated in July. Ideaken platform is enabling MNCs and social sector solve some of the tough problems they are facing. During the discussion, we explored following questions on open innovation with Jayesh:

• What is open innovation?
• How do you formulate the right challenge?
• How do solvers protect their IP?
• Have you had customers who announce the challenge, learn from the submitted ideas and not select any?
• Does every challenge have to result in a prize?
• Do you help solvers in finding if there is a patent related to their idea?
• What is the value addition you (Ideaken) do in the whole open innovation process?

Here is a sample Q&A. For complete discussion, please see here.

Q: What is open innovation?

Jayesh: If you look at every innovation, it can be traced back to a simple question, “Can this be done better?” If you ask this question to yourself daily, actually you are innovating. If you ask the same question to your team, you may get better answers. If you ask the question to people sitting in this room, it may add further clarity.

Many companies are dealing with some fundamental problems they can’t solve. They have innovation teams working on these problems. Sometimes there is a mental block that innovation can only happen from within. Sometimes it goes even further when individual says, “It has to be from me, so that I get the credit.” This is changing slowly. A lot of people like C K Prahalad have talked about concepts like co-creation. Some companies have started doing it in a bigger way.

It begins with a challenge – the company wants to solve. Now, formulating a challenge is itself a big step. It is not about the details. Sometimes you can write 10 pages and yet nobody understands it. Depending upon the complexity and clarity associated with the problem, formulating a challenge may take a few days to a few months.

For example, we had this challenge from a food processing company. They have the packaging machines which go fast and pack your food. In this process, air also gets packaged in the packet. From the food point of view, less the air better the shelf life. But unlike items like pen or pencil, you can’t remove all the air from food – air is part of the food sometimes e.g. cake. So the challenge is how to remove maximum air without affecting the product in optimal time. You could slow down the process to do it better. But that affects you productivity – how many packets you can pack in a minute also matters. So in essence even if you can reduce the air by 5-10% then you are talking about a significant gain in product shelf life.

Once such a challenge is formulated and announced, it goes through a clarification phase from interested solves. Someone might say, “I don’t understand this aspect of the challenge.” Or “I think I can reduce the air only so much, is it ok?”  A challenge duration may wary from a month to 3 months. Outcome from short duration challenges are just ideas while some amount of detailed solutions are expected from a longer duration challenge. When we launched this specific challenge related to food packaging, we received solutions from 20 countries. 

Highlights of the Next Gear program on innovation leadership, July 5-6, 2012

I facilitated a 2-day program “Next Gear: Gearing up forinnovation leadership” on July 5-6 held at Hotel Grand Mercure, Bangalore. Participants came from both for-profit and not-for-profit organizations. The objective of the program was to learn how to lead organization’s innovation initiative effectively. Here are some highlights of the program.

Innovation leader’s navigation matrix: It is not enough to know which medicines to take. It is important to know which one to take when. Every organization’s situation is different. Hence, we parameterized the context using a 3x3 navigation matrix (see below). You need to assess if the problem at hand is primarily that of a dry idea pipeline, low idea velocity or poor batting average. Similarly, we need to assess if the situation is primarily an Elephant problem (lack of motivation) or a Rider problem (lack of direction) or both (e.g. see the Elephant-Rider model). Over the 2-days we filled this matrix with various approaches.

2 core interventions: bright spots & challenge book: Then we looked at 2 interventions which we consider as fundamental and applicable in most situations. One, how to run a challenge campaign effectively and two, how to find and clone bright spots. In the process we created a participants’ challenge book. Here is how it looks:

How to improve idea velocity? Next we looked at various ways in which we can improve the rate at which ideas can move forward. One of them was: low-cost high-speed experimentation. Among the many real life examples we looked at, one was the pea-plant experiment performed by the father of Indian cinema, Dadasaheb Phalke a hundred years ago (in 1912). The experiment got him funding for his first film, Raja Harischandra.

Design Thinking vs TRIZ: We ended day-1 with a panel discussion on two creative problem solving methodologies: TRIZ and Design Thinking. Dr. Bala Ramadurai a TRIZ expert and Lakshman Pachineela a Design Thinking expert shared their views on how these two approaches work.

Managing big bets: During this session we looked at various approaches of managing big bets e.g. innovation sandbox. At the end, we had a panel discussion where Dr. Ashwin Naik, CEO of Vaatsalya, Dr. Ishwar Parulkar, CTO, Cisco and JayeshBadani, CEO, Ideaken shared their experiences in managing big bets.

Enabling a culture change: Most innovation initiatives need to enable a culture change as well. How do you do it? Raja Chidambaram a change facilitation consultant and V R Prasanna, CEO of Sikshana Foundation shared their perspectives on the topic.

Participant presentations: Participants presented the two actions they plan to take away from the workshop. Within two months several participants had implemented at least one of their actions such as executing a challenge campaign. Here is a summary of participant take-aways.

Articles summarizing the panel discussions in this workshop:

Design Thinking vs TRIZ: A panel discussion, July 31, 2012

Managing a big bet: Dr. Ashwin Naik, CEO of Vaatsalya shares his experience, Aug 7, 2012

Enabling a culture change in rural government schools: Prasanna shares Sikshana experience, Sept 15, 2012
Open innovation: Ideaken CEO Jayesh Badani shares his experience, Sept 23, 2012

Source: Phalke’s photo is from the film Harischandrachi Factory.