Copycat award: A step towards addressing NIH syndrome

Fourth India Innovation Summit: I attended Fourth India Innovation Summit at Leela, Bangalore last week organized by CII. Like the previous one I attended three years back in 2005, I enjoyed the conference where a number of innovation champions spoke on various themes like innovation in emerging markets, systematic innovation, innovation ecosystem, and innovation in rural India etc. In the next few articles, I will write about the themes which I found interesting.

Copycat Award: Madhabi Puri Buch, Executive Director, from ICICI Bank spoke about innovation management efforts at her organization. According to her, the topmost hurdle in keeping innovation going at ICICI is the “Not Invented Here (NIH)” syndrome. This mindset makes it difficult to implement an idea in one department when it has actually come from some other department. Well, this is what ICICI Bank has done. They have introduced a prestigious award called “Copycat award”. This award is given to the team which demonstrates successful implementation of an idea which has come from somewhere else.

Creativity and Execution: At the root of NIH mindset is the belief that “creativity” part of innovation is “cool” and “execution” is uncool. If I haven’t done the “cool” part, why should I do the “uncool” part? To quote Prof. Vijay Govindarajan from his book 10 Rules for Strategic Innovators: We think of organization’s capacity for innovation as the product of creativity and execution. Some quick math: which is more effective – lifting your creativity score from 6 to 7, or doubling your execution score from 1 to 2? Nonetheless, most companies, when hoping to improve innovation, focus on generating ideas. Managers obsess over the front end of the innovation. But the real leverage is in the backend – in execution. It is not the idea that counts; it is what you do with it.

Well, how about copying the “copycat award” process to begin with?

Knowledge management and Innovation management: Is the relationship more like live-in, marriage or divorced?

I wrote about some of the top challenges and non-challenges in innovation management in an earlier article. I facilitated a deep dive session on one of the challenges in our last k-community meeting hosted at Perot Systems, Bangalore. The topic was: “Knowledge management and Innovation management: Is the relationship more like live-in, marriage or divorce?” We had a good discussion with participants from Bosch, Honeywell, IISc, Mercer, Mindtree, TCS, Titan, Wipro apart from our hosts at Perot Systems. Here is a gist of the session:

There were primarily 2 schools of thought: one expressing the classical KM view where knowledge creation is considered an integral part of knowledge management. And the others feeling that knowledge management as it is practiced is primarily about improving the operational efficiency in the organization. And hence, it is more suitable for incremental innovation but not for radical innovation.

Advocates of the classical view stressed that collaboration both formal (through CoPs) and informal (coffee table discussion) are essential for creating radical ideas. And knowledge management function owns the responsibility to create an environment where such collaboration fosters. Many others felt there is a big gap between this view and where things stand today.

All agreed that there is a lot that can be leveraged by finding synergies among these two initiatives in the organizations. Unfortunately, many times these initiatives are under two different departments: KM comes under either quality or HR and IM under research, marketing or strategy dept. When both have their own sources of funding, and perhaps a purpose independent of each other, why marry?

Bangalore 10K run and a (N=1, R=G) model

Bangalore 10K run: It was a sheer joy to be part of the Sunfeast Bangalore 10K run a couple of weeks back. The amount of time I took to complete the run (1 hr 10 min) was almost 4 times my usual jog. However, the spirit of crowd gives so much energy; I did not even realize when the finish line came (it took me the next 3-4 days to recover though). There was another reason why the experience was very satisfying. The person who took the initiative to register me – my wife Gauri – completed the run in almost the same time as me and she had happiness all over her face for the rest of the day. What I did not know was that there would be a business associated with the race exemplifying C. K. Prahlad’s (N=1, R=G) business model that is going to generate a smile again on Gauri’s face in a week’s time. Before we look at the business, let’s take a short detour and understand what (N=1, R=G) is all about.

(N=1, R=G) model: In their latest book, “The new age of innovation” C. K. Prahalad and M. S. Krishnan present evolution of business models over the past century. The two pillars of this model are: (1) How many consumers does one product target? (2) Where all does the firm mobilize resources from? For example, let’s look at Ford’s Model-T which came out in 1908. It was a product based on “one model fits all” principle (“Any color is ok as long as it is black”). Moreover, the resources producing the car had to be with the firm all located in and around Dearborn, Michigan. Ford was one of the most vertically integrated firms. Now, compare this model to Amazon’s model. When I log-in to amazon, it displays the books (say, on innovation) which interest me. When I e-browse a book, it also shows me the reviews and also other books which are related to the topic. I certainly feel it is an experience unique to me. Where all does Amazon pull the resources from? From a number of bookstores across the world, developers in US, Europe, Asia, in short, all over the world. Prahalad calls this model (N=1, R=G) i.e. value is based on unique & personalized experience and is based on access to resources across the globe (as against ownership of resources co-located).

Marathon-photos.com: Coming back to Bangalore 10K run. Both I and Gauri got emails from marathon-photos.com saying that to see our photos from the run, we need to go their website and type our bib-number. When we typed Gauri’s bib-number, there were 7 photos with Gauri in the centre (and my bib-number showed only one photo, I guess looks matter). Clearly an N=1 model. The firm is headquartered in New Zealand and is market leader in event photography. However, the people who took our photos were locals sitting back-to-back on a motorcycle while taking the snaps. I am sure the project was contracted to them. An R=G model.

You can read more about the book and C. K. Prahalad videos in this recent businessweek article.

Related article: My second 10K run: finding a rhythm & black-n-white goals

Assessing efficiency of your internal innovation bazaar

Bringing Silicon Valley Inside: I read the paper “Bringing Silicon Valley inside” by Gary Hamel (HBR Sept-Oct 1999) after Prof. Krishnan mentioned it in his talk last week on “Efficiency vs. Innovation” at k-community meeting. Hamel and Valikangas have presented an extension of this work in the paper “Internal Markets: Emerging governance structures for innovation”. In this article, I present my understanding of the idea presented in the paper and also a tool for assessing your “internal innovation market”.

Limitations of Hierarchy: After studying Silicon Valley as if it is a giant organization with its own capital and resource allocation decisions, Hamel concludes that valley thrives on resource “attraction” rather than resource “allocation”. Traditional management hierarchy achieves “sustaining” innovation through exploratory activities aligned with and exploiting existing competencies and businesses. Hence, ideas which are not aligned with current businesses are likely to be ignored or suppressed. After all, if all ideas from Valley went to Bill Gates for approval, only those supporting Windows platform would have survived. According to Hamel, 3 markets are critical for radical innovation: (1) Market for ideas (2) Market for capital (3) Market for talent.

What are markets? A market is a place where buyers and sellers find each other, players compete for best goods & resources, where individuals exercise choice. It is also a mechanism for resource allocation and it is supported by social network of brokers, buyers and sellers.

Assessing your internal innovation bazaar: Do you have a market for ideas? Well, it will depend upon who is suggesting the ideas and who is selecting them. If only senior executives from current businesses suggest ideas and they are the ones who select them, result is known before the exam. On the other hand, if you have an ecosystem of customers, suppliers and employees who suggest ideas and a panel separate from current business selects them there is a good chance that radical ideas will survive. Extending these questions for the other two markets (capital and talent) I have created following three dimensional dashboard. Can you assess efficiency of your internal innovation market?

Top challenges and non-challenges in Innovation management

This month’s k-community meeting was hosted by Firstsource last Wednesday. K-community is an informal network of people in Bangalore interested in knowledge management. There were 2 presentations: One by Tharun from Firstsource and the other by Prof. Rishikesh Krishnan from IIMB. Tharun presented the tool Firstsource is using for logging and tracking ideas. Prof. Krishnan presented “Balancing Innovation & Efficiency”. There were representatives from various organizations like Capgemini, TCS, Wipro, Honeywell, Robert Bosch, Accenture etc.

During the networking session as well as during the presentations, people articulated their views on what they find challenging and not-so-challenging in managing innovation at their organization. Here is my take-away:

Non-challenges:

• Innovation management tool: All organizations use some tool or the other for idea management. Some of them are made inhouse (like Firstsource, Wipro) and some of them are pay-as-you-use kind-of tools. In general, I felt that nobody was saying tool is a limiting factor.

• Idea generation: People narrated their experiences in idea generation. Some organizations gathered 500 ideas through ideation workshops, while some other large organizations (like Wipro) got several thousand ideas when the initiative was launched.

• Structure: I felt that putting a structure around innovation management (i.e. having a small separate team and identifying innovation champions within business units etc.) is something many organizations have put in place.

Challenges:

• Idea selection: People mentioned 2 specific challenges in idea selection phase. One is having a robust criterion such that organization does not loose out on good ideas as well as it does not end up working on too many not-so-value-creating ideas. The other is to be able to connect ideas with other ideas in the organization or connecting ideas to other experts who can help expand on the ideas. Ideas, by their nature, are many times cross-functional (running across multiple businesses or sometimes they are related to non-businesses). A representative from Wipro mentioned how an idea which was logged by an engineer from Wipro’s Kochi office related to robotics (which was not a practice in Wipro) finanally helped Wipro start a robotics practice.

• Getting semi-radical and radical ideas: The second challenge people mentioned is: How do we balance our innovation portfolio with appropriate mix of incremental and radical innovation opportunities? Currently 80% to 99% of ideas are incremental in nature and people felt not enough of radical innovation is happening in their organizations.

• Sustainability of the innovation engine: Most people I talked to felt that sustaining the innovation engine is very difficult. Or perhaps, it is inherently cyclic in nature (sometimes it is running well, other times it is not). For most people, doing something innovative means doing extra and there is no incentive to do that extra bit. Structure and idea management tool takes you only so far.

• Connecting KM with Innovation management: In most organizations, knowledge management and innovation efforts run parallel and rarely cross. Conventional wisdom says that knowledge creation and harvesting can’t be that separate. Prof. Krishnan commented something to this effect “Any movement (like CMM, KM) which Indian IT industry takes on seriously is finally reduced to fantastic processes without much soul in them”.

Tech-ladder under Infy radar: challenge is to manage demand-side equation

Infy is undergoing major organizational restructuring (Economic Times, 22-May-2008, “Infosys plans organizational restructuring”). Among other things, providing more flexibility and movement for employees is one of the drivers. To quote from the article: One of the issues it will address is greater flexibility and movement of people within the organization. For instance, it could provide an alternative career path to employees who don’t want to manage people but who are technically competent.

This thought process is laudable. Earlier this year I wrote in “Beware of technical ladder roles” how technical ladder is becoming a popular tool among HR heads to address the attrition challenge of the IT industry. However, organizations need to be careful how they trade the path. I feel that there are 2 major drivers for tech-ladder:

1. Demand-side driver: If organization can have senior technical specialists, then they can help organization moving up the value chain by solution architecting and technically anchoring complex projects
2. Supply-side driver: Experienced talent pool needs flexibility in their roles to leverage its strengths

Usually, the supply-side driver is the first one that gets attention and a tool like tech-ladder seems to address it. Until, as time passes, these so called “architects” and “principal engineers” realize that there is no “meat” in the job. This is where, I feel, proper homework needs to be done in defining “meaningful” roles which the business demands. This is what I wrote earlier this month in the article “Creating meaningful technical leadership roles in Indian IT services industry”

“Creating a Desired Future” workshop: A satisfying experience

Hala, Raja and I facilitated a 2.5 day workshop titled “Creating a desired future” in the first week of May. The objective of the workshop was to enable mid-career assessment and action planning. It was a long weekend and school holiday season. With all these odds stacked against it, we had 10 enthusiastic delegates eager to explore their vision, mental blocks, strengths & action planning to achieve their desired future. Moreover, when you have representatives from areas as diverse as Film direction, HR, retail operations, insurance, IT you could not have asked for more. As Hala says, “When vision is powerful, it finds its own ways to put things together”

It has been nearly six months since we three started discussing this idea. Primary trigger came from our observation that most people go through an intense phase of introspection somewhere during their career. This was based on our personal experience as well as our interactions with our friends / colleagues. This observation was further supported by seminal work done by MIT Professor Edgar Schein on career dynamics. According to Prof. Schein, Although it is not clear whether this is a crisis or even a stage, there is mounting evidence that most people go though some kind of reassessment of themselves when they are well into their careers, asking themselves questions about their initial choices (“Have I entered the right career?”), about their levels of attainment (“Have I accomplished all I hoped to accomplish?” or “What have I accomplished and was it worth the sacrifices?”), and about their futures (“Should I continue or make a change?” or “What do I want to do with the rest of my life, and how does work fit into it?”). And we asked, “Can we assist people in this phase in a structured way?”

As each of us started to explore into different areas we began to see synergies. We realized that we can combine work done by Peter Senge (“Personal Mastery” from "Fifth Discipline"), Robert Fritz (“Path of least resistance”), Otto Scharmer (“Theory U”), Edgar Schein (“Career Dynamics”), and Marcus Buckingham (“Now, discover your strengths”). The challenge was to see how the gap between “current reality (CR)” and “desired future (DF)” can be bridged through an action plan that is anchored in one’s strengths. Raja and Hala have seen many visioning exercises in their consulting career where people find this gap between CR and DF far too intimidating.

As Ludi Goganovic, my friend who grew up in Germany and later worked in the US, observes, “In India, we have a lot more people doing a job for various reasons other than they being passionate about it.” Imagine the kind of place this will be if instead of say, 1% people following their passion, 5% start doing it. That is the grand vision.