Investor's Business Daily, June 26th, 2007
To boost innovation levels, promote partnerships. Form collaborative networks in and out of your firm, pool patents with other companies and encourage industrywide standards. That's the advice of Keith Sawyer, a product designer, business coach and author of the new book "Group Genius."
To promote collaboration:
Widen the loop. In 2006, Google GOOG hosted four Code Jam competitions, giving users and developers worldwide "an opportunity to work on its most difficult technical problems," Sawyer said. The top prize was $10,000, and thousands of users participated.
The country's leading firms, from IBM IBM to Amazon AMZN, have teamed with customers in a range of profitable ways, he says.
Learn from the extremes. Collaboration with customers is common in the extreme-sports niche. "A 2002 study found that 38% of the 287 mountain bikers interviewed had an idea for how to improve their bikes, and almost 50% of those ideas had been implemented by the bikers themselves," Sawyer said.
Several of the improvements made it to market.
Dive into the patent pool. In a number of niches, pooling patents is practical and profitable. "With both the airline and sewing machine industries, once the competitors got out of the courtroom and pooled their patents, innovation took off," said Sawyer. "With pooled patents, every company shares in the collective benefits of participating in (a collaborative) web."
Ditch the org chart. If your firm expects innovation to come only from research and development, you're "still using the old linear model of creativity," Sawyer said. "In the collaborative organization, innovation is diffused throughout the company."
Innovative firms such as Procter & Gamble PG are measuring degrees of collaboration across all units. Using a tool called "social network analysis," they measure "all the connections within an organization -- particularly those informal interactions that don't show up on an organizational chart," he said.
Promote creative conversation. This is most effectively done through open floor plans. "In BP's BP Houston office, workers are separated by no more than waist-high furniture and clustered into neighborhoods around cafes," Sawyer said. "To increase the likelihood of unplanned conversations, the office is designed so employees have to walk through the cafes to get from one neighborhood to another."
Track innovation. Your board should hold semiannual reviews to judge the effectiveness of -- and perhaps the increased need for -- new ideas companywide, says Robert Price, author of "The Eye for Innovation."
"Beyond increasing board (members') understanding and having helpful discussion of innovative initiatives, these reviews send a clear message" to key employees.
Level the field. "With universal and shared standards (industrywide), modular innovation takes off -- anyone can attach a new innovation to the rest of the system," Sawyer said. "Proprietary ownership of a standard almost always reduces innovation."
