Increasing demand for innovation

• Increased user sophistication - particularly due to new digital content access forms
• All companies striving to gain a competitive advantage to maximize it’s stock value.
• Looking to differentiate their product from increasingly similar competition
• Not just special effects and, new delivery devices e.g.:
  • Process
  • Presentation,
  • Product / service,
  • Geography,
  • Value chain,
  • Industry structure

• The life-cycle of innovation is accelerating
• 4 levels of competency
  • Unconsciously Incompetent – Don’t know that they don’t know e.g. Homer Simpson – get hit by innovation / lightning but don’t know what happened
  • Consciously Incompetent – Know they don’t know, don’t want to know e.g. Dilbert – actively watch and avoid lightening complicating their lives
  • Unconsciously Competent – Brilliant talents but undisciplined. Successful using instinct but lack process and can’t teach what they do. e.g. Muttley & Dick Darstardly – generate lots of lightening / ideas but often have trouble managing or harnessing it’s potential
  • Consciously Competent – Innovation is a disciplined process of test, learn, measure, go-forward / discard e.g. Einstein or DaVinci – have lightning in their palms – like a sparkler from a birthday cake or putting your hand on a lightning ball.

Challenging dynamics of innovation

• Two types:
  • Tactical / evolutionary / incremental. Problem is that often the idea is easily replicated. One hit wonders: Bling Bling
  • Sustainable - 5 pillars of breakthrough innovation:
    • Can’t imitate,
    • Profitable,
    • Departure from existing standard (in your category),
    • Change perception of industry,
    • Charge premium for your product / service (affect stock price)

• Barriers to successful sustainable innovation
  • There is often a gap between where companies need to be and where they are (called Innovation Gap)
  • There is also a delay in activating innovation that is often proportional to size of a company. This is due to added layers of bureaucracy and resistance to change
  • Process unfortunately can be considered to retard innovation because it gives more opportunities for people to say no and retards agility
• Risk management
  • Understand the difference between real and perceived risk
  • Most of our effort in innovating is managing acceptance of risk
• Dimensionalise and define brand need to risk because of pressures from:
  • Stock market
  • Corporation
  • Category disruption
  • Consumer disruption
  • Personal – career
  • Political
• Risk from different perspectives
  • Client
  • Client marketing
  • Client media
  • Digital
  • Traditional Account director
• Managing risk
  • Understanding risk from several perspectives:
  • Your risk profile
  • Risk profile of your customer
  • Profile of stakeholder in decision process.
• Checkpoints & Accountability
  • Controls, checks and balances
  • Gateways for progressive approval at various stages e.g. tough decision points to decide whether to progress or stop and concentrate on another effort
  • Clear, simple measurement metrics
  • Results – because the approval isn’t important – the final result is

You can innovate through Leadership

• Understand dynamics. I can help you identify / understand the dynamics of a situation, but I can’t give you the solution to every problem. If you understand the pieces to the puzzle, you can put them together in different ways to solve problems yourself.
• Create a vision of what could happen to dynamics for your industry (and similar)
• Increased discipline: FIRE (Focus, Ideation, Rank, Execution)
  • Focus: Ask hard questions, deeper insights for briefs
  • Ideation: Pushing the ideas, metaphors, parallels
  • Rank: Sorting ideas (realistic, ownable, 5 pillars etc)
  • Execution: Checkpoints, measurement metrics
• Strive for Conscious Competence
• Connecting the dots in different ways

Powerpoint available on SLIDESHARE