Building creative confidence in housekeeping & model-making staff at Agastya

Building Creative Confidence in Housekeeping & Model making staff at Agastya from vpdabholkar

Can anyone innovate? Really? Even a semi-literate? I have been curious about this question. I got an opportunity to test some of these assumptions when we facilitated a design thinking workshop for housekeeping & model making staff at Kuppam campus of Agastya International Foundation. Many participants, especially the housekeeping staff members, were school dropouts. 

The highlights of the workshop are depicted in the presentation above. Here are a few things that struck me:

Photographs/videos: The participants were given cameras to take pictures of the problem areas associated within their work context. These photos were projected and a representative from the team presented the problem. I was impressed by the photos / videos they took. I was later told that one of the ladies who articulated a problem rarely speaks – even with her colleagues. So this session helped building confidence in communicating your problem.

Persistence: Shanthamma became our role model during the solutioning phase. She & her team were working on the problem where the ladies have to carry hot tea pots over a distance of few hundred metres. Shanthamma started drawing a cycle as a solution to carry the tea pot. She struggled for 20 minutes to draw a cycle but she didn’t give up. In fact, she didn’t budge from her seat while everybody else went for a coffee break. You can see her efforts in the presentation (page 15).

Experiment design: Towards the end, the teams designed 1-day and 1-week experiments. Here they answered the questions, “Which assumptions can we validate in 1-day and 1-week?” That created moments of truth for some participants. They realized, “Well, we could get started today. We can begin the journey of solving our problems ourselves.”

In the final session, Dr. Shibu listened to their presentations, encouraged them to go ahead with the experiments and offered his support. That gave confidence to the participants.

A personal learning for me came from the wallet design session. The ladies couldn’t relate to the concept of wallet or purse. Instead, they re-designed their lunch box. For some people, a lunch-box is more relevant than a wallet!

I appreciate the encouragement from Ramji Raghavan and Dr. Shibu Shankaran in this experiment. And without enthusiastic support from Janani, Subbu and Uday this was impossible! Hope this becomes a starting point for us to take design thinking at various levels in the school education system.

Update from Agastya (30-Aug-13):
These are some the ideas suggested by the workshop participants that have been implemented,

1) Washing clothes and Drying area have been allocated.
2) Temporary ID cards have been issued to the Workshop workers and they will be given a permanent ID card soon.
3) The rain water drainage problem has been solved
4) First level of VisionWorks have been cleared and its being used for better purposes.

Catalign Quarterly – June 2013

Catalign Quarterly is an attempt to put together insights relevant for fostering a culture of innovation in organizations – both for-profit and not-for-profit. Through articles and interviews we explore principles, practices and policies that help organizations become more innovative.

Theme for this quarterly is “8 steps to innovation – in action”. Since its release in March our book “8 steps to innovation: Going from jugaad to excellence” has gone places from corporates to Government departments.  I and my co-author Prof. Rishikesha Krishnan were invited by several dozen organizations to (a) spread awareness of systematic innovation (b) assess innovation maturity and (c) help in action planning for the next steps in innovation journey. We know that these are early days for “8 steps” adoption. However, following articles give a glimpse of how “8 steps” was put into action.

3 characteristics of “8 steps to innovation” framework: This article highlights the 3 characteristics of 8 steps approach – (1) simple measurement (2) culture sensitivity and (3) bias for experimentation.

Building a challenge book (step-2): An example from an IIMB session: We believe that creating a challenge book for your team / organization is an important step in your innovation journey. In this article, I analyse a challenge book created in an IIMB session from three perspectives (1) emotional appeal (2) concrete goals and (3) hooks for imagination.

Using navigation matrix in the innovation journey: “8-steps” approach provides a 3x3 matrix for action planning. One axis is “What to improve?” and the other axis is “How to sustain the change?” Depending upon what you want to improve and the nature of change, “8 steps” proposes several options. This articles presents a few scenarios and how the navigation matrix was used in creating a response.

5-level assessment framework based on 8 steps to innovation: In the past few months we got an opportunity to participate in the assessment of innovation maturity of several for-profit and Government departments. Some of these were informal or quick assessments. We believe over 70% of corporate and over 80% of Government departments in India are either at level-1 (Jugaad) or level-2 (Foundation) or somewhere in between.

Book review:

3 things I liked in Richard Rumelt’s Good Strategy, Bad Strategy: In this article I present the three things I liked about this book: (1) Emphasis on identifying the challenge (2) the role of Proximate objectives and (3) Treating strategy as a hypothesis. Finally, I discuss some places where it intersects with 8-steps approach.

4 things I liked about the corporate venture program at Ericsson

Ericsson hired Gabriel Broner in March 2010 as Head of Innovation at the development unit IP & Broadband headquartered in Silicon Valley. The mandate was, “Please make 6,000 people across world more innovative”. Broner narrates the story of the innovation program he has been running at Ericsson since September 2010 here. In two years, it has generated 2000 ideas, 200 of which got first round of funding and 20+ have got multiple rounds of funding. Top three in the pipeline promise an estimated $20 million in software revenue and productivity improvements representing greater than 5 ROI. Here are 4 things I liked about Innova.

Explicit sponsorship: Many times idea contests give awards for the winners and the story pretty much ends with that. Innova does it differently. If your idea is selected you get $500 and a week off from your regular office time to work on your idea. In November 2010, two guys in Milan, Italy received the first VISA card with $500 and the experimentation week-off. You can’t do a whole lot with $500 and a week’s time. Or so we think. But Gmail prototype was built overnight. Similarly, 3-D model and a prototype print can happen in a week’s time. The idea in the initial stages is to have the crude idea take some shape. Explicit sponsorship can send a strong message to people around.

Revenue or productivity impact: Growth is the primary driver for corporate venture programs. Hence, it is natural to have a bias for ideas that penetrate new markets or new products that delight existing customers. However, if you want more people to participate in such a program, you need to widen the scope of innovation. Far more people in the organization are internal facing and are likely to have ideas for productivity improvement than new product ideas. The story of Stefano and Paolo who got funding for their idea to improve simulation productivity by 10x tells that Innova included productivity improvement as part of its scope.

Rewarding failures: During the experimentation week Stefano and Paolo in the earlier example didn’t achieve the expected 10x improvement. They could get only 2x. However, they were given Innova award for “Best experimentation Week” for what they learned and achieved. The duo went back to Milan after receiving the reward in Silicon Valley and quickly proposed a plan for a second round of funding. During the three months they spent, Stefano and Paolo exceeded their target in some cases. Simulations that would take 40 days were now done overnight. That is the power of rewarding failures & learnings.

Methods & tools: Ericsson adopted Design Thinking as a methodology to promote methods and tools for innovation. DT emphasizes customer centricity and rapid experimentation. Whether it is DT or something else, it helps to provide coaching to teams in tackling their project / BU specific challenges. Many other organizations like P&G, Toyota, Cognizant, SAP Lab have integrated training programs with their innovation projects.

I don’t believe that working on the side could lead to large impact innovations. Companies need to find way to create space & time for incubating ideas. I hope programs like Innova inspire more companies. I appreciate Broner for sharing the insights through his article.

Source: 

Spreading grassroots Silicon Valley-style innovation in an establishedcompany with Ericsson Innova, Gabriel Broner, Jan 3, 2013.

MNC innovation in India revisited: New challenges and opportunities, Rishikesha Krishnan, May 25, 2013

3 characteristics of “8-steps to innovation” approach

How is “8-steps to innovation” different from other approaches? This is a common question that we get asked. It is a valid question. After all there are so many books out there proposing their distinct approaches to innovation. Here is an attempt to present 3 characteristics of 8-steps approach.

Simple measurement: The first thing 8-steps approach emphasizes is usage of simple measurement. A measurement that can be carried out in a team of five and also in an organization of one lakh employees. Measurement emphasis has enabled us to create a simple 5-level self-assessment framework. In the past two weeks since we shared the framework, we have already received inputs from more than two dozen managers. Some of them have been more open than others in sharing where they believe their organization stands. However, none of them has said, “I don’t understand it”. Whether it is pipeline, velocity, batting average, participation, number of experiments, we have proposed ways of measuring the progress.

Culture-sensitive approach: 8 steps approach has nothing to prescribe unless some aspects of the context and culture are known. For example, you need to have clarity on what you want to improve. Is it idea pipeline, velocity or batting average? Similarly, you need to check whether the problem is primarily the Elephant problem or the Rider problem (lack of motivation or direction)? This article shows how this works. It is an iterative approach. In each iteration, you need to identify where one stands, what to improve and then design a robust intervention to improve the situation.

Bias for experimentation:  8-steps approach highlights the importance of taking big bets. However, it assumes that big bets are likely to carry risks some of which can’t be resolved early in the lifecycle.  In fact, we strongly believe that it is impossible to predict the success of big bets. Hence, it emphasizes rapid iteration ideally with low cost in validating the assumptions associated with ideas. For big bets it emphasizes building structures such as a sandbox that enable low-cost high-speed high-volume experimentation.

5 levels of innovation maturity

One feedback I and my co-author Rishikesha Krishnan have been getting in our talks/discussions is – Is there a way to assess where we stand on innovativeness based on the framework in 8-steps to innovation? That triggered us to create an assessment framework. In this article we present a broad outline of the framework and illustrate how organizations move from one level to the next in their innovation journey. We will use publicly available data from two organizations: Toyota and Cognizant. We really appreciate the detailed accounts created and made publicly available by Yuzo Yasuda for Toyota and Kumar Sachidanandam for Cognizant. We hope more organizations follow the practice in future.

From Ad-hoc to Foundation level: Level-1 called Ad-Hoc is no brainer – if you don’t track ideas in any form, then you are at level-1. To begin your journey from Ad-Hoc to Foundation level (level-2), you need to implement 3 core processes: idea management, buzz creation and training & development. However, to qualify you at the foundation level, you must get at least 10% of the employees to contribute at least one idea annually. This journey can take a few days to a few years depending upon the size of the organization. For example, it took Toyota 5 years and Cognizant  3 years to clear the 10% participation hurdle.

In the early phase, most organizations emphasize idea management process and also organize trainings. However, the process which needs special attention is the buzz creation process. Apart from rewards and recognition, it involves things like organizing events, running campaigns, publishing newsletters, success stories and dashboards, building communities of practice etc. In Toyota it involved organizing exhibition of implemented ideas, field trips and changing the tone of the communication from a formal to informal. In Cognizant, it involved creating a set of champions who facilitated igniter sessions, identified problems, mentored idea authors etc. Moreover, it involved organizing innovation fairs in India (4 in the 3^rd year) and outside India (11 in the 3^rd year), publishing innovation journal from second year and organizing innovation summit from the third year.

From Foundation to Engaged level: Level-3 is called “Engaged”. Getting 10% of the people engaged innovation activity is one thing. However, sustaining the engagement at 30% is something else. What are the people engaged in? People are engaged in various activities related to innovation, but at this point the two activities which matter most are experimentation and reviews. The metric also says at least 10% of the ideas should have prototypes created for them. Unfortunately, this data is not available from these organizations. However, we believe that creating a culture of experimentation is perhaps the most difficult aspect in this journey. For management, getting a habit of reviewing ideas / proposals and doing it effectively also takes time. For a services company like Cognizant, it may involve facilitation in getting a buy-in from customers. This is also a crucial phase when the treatment given to those whose ideas / experiments have failed sends a strong signal to everyone. If the organization can’t show tolerance for failure during innovation, it is difficult clear this level. For Cognizant, the 30% hurdle was cleared in 3 years since the program started. Note that another requirement to clear this level is to have business impact calculator in place. For Cognizant it was put in place in the third year.

For Toyota, it took 15 years cumulatively to clear level-3 and 10 years after clearing level-2. Getting middle management engaged is usually a challenge. Toyota mandated that for the second round of review of selected ideas, it is not the idea author (typically a shop floor worker) but his manager present the case. A self-organized community of gold-silver-bronze medalists called “Good Idea Club” made a difference.  

From Engaged to Aligned: Up to level-3 (Engaged) the innovation program can run within a division or function. However, at some point it needs to enable differentiation for the organization i.e. it should align with the strategy of the organization and perhaps help create one. This usually means two things: One, there should be one or more innovation sandboxes with dedicated teams created within a few strategic constraints and experimentation should go from low-cost high-speed to low-cost high-speed and high-volume within the sandbox. Two, there should be a healthy big idea pipeline e.g. Total potential impact of the big idea pipeline > 10% of revenue. For most organizations it also means having a few specialists who can think deep within their domains of expertise.

At Cognizant, creating a concept lab was a step in the direction. Specific focus areas were identified e.g. Text mining, Faceted browsing and Robotics and slowly expanded to include semantic web, big data analytics, autonomous computing, augmented reality etc.

Note that idea per person per year metric is expected to be at least 1 to clear this level. It took Toyota 19 years cumulatively to clear this and Cognizant may have cleared it the current financial year.

From Aligned to High Batting Average: This is the final and output centric level. Rate of success for implemented ideas especially for large impact ideas should be greater than 50%. We have borrowed this metric from what A G Lafley ex-CEO of P&G set for their innovation program. Similarly, it helps to see how much of current business comes from the innovations in the past 5 years. We have currently put 20% - similar to product vitality index of 3M which is currently at 33% and that of Eureka Forbes which is also at much higher than 20%.

This is our current view and it is evolving as we talk to more organizations. I keep updating this post with the latest version of the assessment chart. If you have any inputs and/or need any help in assessment, please contact us at: vinay@catalign.com. 

Source:

Yuzo Yasuda, “40 years, 20 million ideas”, Productivity Press, 1990.

Kumar Sachidanandam et. al, “Is managed innovation an oxymoron?” Jan 7, 2013.

Using the navigation matrix in the innovation journey: from 8 steps to innovation

The title of our book “8 steps to innovation” can be misleading. It doesn’t advocate following steps 1 to 8 similar to a Do-It-Yourself kit to get a ready-made culture of innovation. Similarly, it is not meant to offer a basket of techniques to be used as per the taste of the user. It is more like a fault-diagnosis and service manual. It proposes an iterative approach involving diagnosis and corrective action to progress along the innovation journey. Let’s see how it works in this article.

In the diagnosis phase “8 steps” offers a 3x3 matrix to identify what problem you are trying to solve. It looks like this:

The two questions it asks are: (1) What to improve? and; (2) How to sustain the change? For the first question, you need to check whether your problem is primarily that of pipeline, velocity or batting average. Similarly, for the second question, you need to check if the problem you are trying to solve is a Rider problem (lack of direction) or an Elephant problem (lack of motivation) for one or more stakeholders. Elephant problem can be addressed by an activity appealing to the emotion and/or developing a structure/process that is easy to implement (shape the path). Now, let’s look at a concrete example depicted in the presentation below.

8 steps to innovation: in action from vpdabholkar

The situation was like this (Please see page 15 of the presentation). The innovation program was launched in December 2010 and within a month 40 ideas were received from 25 people. Management was supportive of the selected ideas and some of them moved forward. However, management felt that none of the ideas was “interesting enough”. It meant that none of them was promising to impact the business significantly. Was it an Elephant problem or a Rider problem? It was a Rider problem. People didn’t know which are the top problems facing the business.

One way to focus the creative energy of employees is to launch a challenge campaign. A first step in this direction is to create a challenge book (step-2). I facilitated a session of 15 managers / senior managers where a challenge book consisting of 20 business challenges was identified. We took the challenge book to the CEO who selected a challenge to be launched as a campaign. This time around 20 ideas came as a response. However, they were different from the previous ones in two respects. One, the quality of many of the ideas was much better. Detailed cost-benefit analysis was presented. Two, at least a few ideas involved cross-functional collaboration – say a supply chain executive teaming up with a sourcing executive etc. A cross-functional team led by a Vice President was formed to take the selected ideas forward.

The presentation depicts three more such examples involving different kinds of problems. Each example starts with a diagnosis of the situation, identification of one more steps as a response, a few experiments and finally an implementation. Monthly dashboard is a good trigger to start the diagnosis. 

Related article: If you want to know what the 8 steps are, please check out this presentation from my co-author Prof. Rishikesha Krishnan: 8-steps to innovation: An introduction.

Challenge book behind “8 steps to innovation”

One of the myths we talk about in “8 steps to innovation” is a belief that innovation begins with creativity. We observed in our research that most innovations begin with curiosity. This was true for James Watt, Gandhi and Mark Zuckerberg and for many other innovators.  Hence we propose that building a challenge-book – a place where we list the problems we are curious about – is a good beginning. Challenge-book is the second step in our 8-step approach. What kind of challenge-book did we as authors build whose response was the approach “8 steps to innovation”? That is what I would like to present in this article.

What are the sources of curiosity? We found 3 that cover majority of the challenges we came across. Those are: Feel the pain, Sense the wave and See the waste. Let’s see what kind of pains, waves and waste we came across that went into building our challenge book.

Feel the pain: My co-author Prof. Rishikesha Krishnan published his previous book “From Jugaad to systematic innovation: The challenge for India” in February 2010. The response from corporate India was – “This is all fine. Tell us how we can go from jugaad to systematic innovation.” Essentially, the managers were saying that they don’t know how to run innovation initiatives effectively in their organizations. They were also saying, “Don’t tell us to be like Steve Jobs or Ratan Tata. We know we can’t. Or don’t tell us to give 20% time free to employees like Google to do whatever they can. Our business model doesn’t permit it.” This became one of the key challenges for us to explore and address.

The second pain area of managers in India is presented succinctly by Baba Kalyani, Chairman Bharat Forge, when he said, “We are slaves in manufacturing;  we have to be our own masters”. This has been a growing aspiration among managers in India to go beyond operational excellence and contribute in the innovation journey of their organization.

Sense the wave:  We, as authors, began to surf two distinct waves. The first wave was related to the growing buzz around “innovation” everywhere but especially in India. We attended the first Innovation Summit conference held in Bangalore in 2005. President of India declared 2010-20 as the decade of innovation and formed National Innovation Council headed by Mr. Sam Pitroda. Tata Group, India’s laregest conglomerate, formed a group-wide forum called Tata Group Innovation Forum to foster a culture of innovation. Clearly more people in India started talking about innovation than ever before.

The second wave was that of behavioural economics that is shaking up the Rational-Agent model held closely by economists for the past few centuries. Daniel Kahneman getting Nobel in 2002 and then Malcolm Gladwell’s bestseller Blink creating debate around intuition helped. Right from Greenspan to Michael Porter began to admit that lack of frameworks for thinking rationally hasn’t been the key challenge for poor decision making. Kahneman and others were showing that the cognitive biases hardwired into our brain are the root cause. It was interesting to ask the question: What does all this mean for innovation management? Can the new understanding help manage innovation more effectively?

See the waste: First decade of this century saw explosive growth of mobile phones and wireless networks. And yet it also saw demise of large telecom companies like Siemens, Nokia, Motorola, Alcatel, Nortel etc. Most of these companies were spending huge money into research – considered by many to be the main ingredient for innovation. Is it possible that these companies were spending the money inefficiently? Perhaps there is a much better way to do innovation?

Another wasteful activity was related to ineffective innovation program management. One of the innovation program manager narrated to us how idea flow shot up right after the program launch. However, over the subsequent months the idea flow came down and finally became a trickle until everybody lost interest.