Investor's Business Daily, March 20th, 2007
You head a firm whose innovation rate is hit and miss. Ask yourself these questions: Does innovation at your company result in organic growth? Is it spurred by streamlined internal systems, or stymied by competing departments? Does your business have an equal focus on products and customers?
The answers could reveal problems at a range of firms, business coach Erich Joachimsthaler says in his forthcoming book, "Hidden in Plain Sight." To get on track:
Bring them together. In recent years, "Samsung's advantage over Sony (has been) attributed to culture," Joachimsthaler said. "Samsung operates more hierarchically and forces marketing, design and R&D to work together."
Result? "New ideas from outside -- changes in consumer tastes in Berlin, Mumbai or Singapore -- travel very fast to engineers in Seoul rather than at Sony, where fractionalism (to a large degree) still rules."
Logistics are also key to the innovation models at FedEx and UPS. Flawless execution is more than a goal; it's the way business is done.
Set a standard. GE remains a success because it's as focused on customers as it is on products.
GE's Imagination Breakthrough "pushes change toward commercial innovation across the entire organization through a process called Cencor," Joachimsthaler noted. "The acronym (more or less) stands for calibrate, explore, create, organize and realize. Behind these words are a set of tools and concepts that help managers bring innovation to everything they do -- from how to formulate a going-to-market plan to how they evaluate their performance with customers."
Tie innovation to internal growth. GE has about 80 Imagination Breakthrough projects under way. Each of them "is expected to deliver $50 million to $100 million in incremental revenue" and support the firm's long-term organic growth target, Joachimsthaler said.
Go customer-centric. Tie new products to new ways to serve customers. Deutsche Telekom has done just that with a relatively new program called Customer Promise.
Key metrics answer these questions, Joachimsthaler said: "How many (steps does the customer have to go through) to get the product he needs? How much time does the customer wait at each store? How many contacts does the customer have to make in order to obtain a repair or replacement?"
DT aligned its ad messages with its metrics. Example: "If you're looking for a new phone, we guarantee you won't have to wait for more than five minutes in one of our stores to be waited on."
Make employees your collaborators. By taking worker input more seriously, the eastern region of the U.S. Forest Service boosted the number of employee suggestions from 63 to more than 6,000 annually, say James Tamm and Ronald Luyet, authors of "Radical Collaboration." The result? Innovation, more-streamlined methods and greater cost savings. In short, the service solved problems it didn't know it had.
Copyright 2007 Investor's Business Daily, Inc.
