BIF Research Advisor Harry West on The Cross-Discipline Design Imperative

This week we're hosting a sold-out workshop on design thinking with Dan Buchner, Vice President of Innovation and Design and his team of designers from Continuum. In preparation for Thursday's event, Dan wanted to share an article on Design Thinking written by BIF Research Advisor Harry West, Continuum's VP of Strategy and Innovation.

It's a good, quick overview on design thinking and its power to marry creative right-brain thinking and analytical left-brain thinking. This talent is at a premium today because innovation so often happens in the space between disciplines. Design thinking can get you into those spaces - it's a strategic methodology, long used by industrial design firms but now it's being used for business process too. I'll share more from the workshop next week but in the meantime, head over to BusinessWeek for the article.

Related: Continuum also created this video to bring to people's attention the growing importance of design thinking in business, and to advocate for a corresponding evolution in design education. Check it out here.

(Image courtesy of InnovateForum)

Posted March 25, 2008 by Chris Flanagan | Permalink | Comments (0)

Building Purposeful Networks: Are You a Dead Node?

How do you establish credibility and authenticity online? Do you find yourself often times in the middle of information? Are you a connection maker? Or are you a dead node? These questions and more were answered last week when entrepreneur and network impresario Ellen Levy was in the house for a casual meet-up with a dozen or so innovation heads here to learn more about building meaningful virtual networks in purposeful ways.

Whether you use LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, or some other network platform, one thing is for sure, online networking is here to stay. Each platform represents a way to not only grow your network, both personally and professionally, but also substantiate it through a self-regulated forum. You can just imagine the possibilities of bringing an entire network of talent to bear on a particular problem.

Which platform is right for you?

Choosing a social networking site is a lot like trying on shoes – there’s always one pair that fits like a glove and you end up wearing repeatedly while there are others you wear to match a particular occasion. Translation: Begin by sampling the offerings and start growing your network slowly. There is a difference between a social network and a professional network. Some people use one site for both. Others – for obvious reasons- prefer to keep their business and personal networks separate. Knowing which one is right for you is simply a matter of experimentation.

Whether you have 20 members in your network or 200, whatever criteria you select to make that connection should be based on your own personal preferences. In Ellen’s case, she uses two basic criteria for accepting or making connections. While I’m certain there are plenty more, this straight-forward litmus test seems like an excellent starting point to experimenting with building your own virtual network: First, ask yourself if you would also be willing to take a call or email from the person you're connecting with and second, would you yourself add value to the chain if you connected?

Can it really change core business processes?

You bet. Ellen told a great story about coordinating a trip last fall to England with 20 or so people and needing to manage the value added tax that would be imposed with her business trip. The normal course of action would be to find an accountant in the UK and go through an arduous question and answer period, officially engage a firm, and pay the usual fees that ensue. Instead, Ellen posed the question on LinkedIn and within 48 hours, she had an answer delivered by an accountant in the UK she'd never actually met, who had intimate knowledge on the subject. Appreciative of the counsel, she then put that accountant in touch with her network which subsequently delivered a new relationship between the accountant’s firm and a top VC firm in Silicon Valley. “What normally would have taken months took two days and it was free,” she said. “It’s a low-cost way to utilize and tap into expertise. But it’s also a gateway to big opportunities.”

The postmodern organization: A professional mash-up

If employees are tapping into flexible networks with permeable boundaries at will, what kind of effect with that have on the postmodern organization? As networks fold and unfold according to the requirements of a particular problem set and resources become increasingly distributed, one could theorize that employee retention rates will eventually become as fluid as the information itself. In fact, Ellen shared a staggering statistic that college graduates will have 4.2 jobs in the first 10 years after graduation. That’s a big constraint for today’s organization and gets back to the headline of this blog entry: Are you a dead node?

How we live the network effect – whether individually or organizationally– will have a huge impact on innovation success rates. Gatekeepers need to transition themselves into gateways. The legendary Tom Peters once said, “business (at its best) is about adventures and quests and growth and gold medals and booby prizes and emotion and service and care and character.” A long time ago, people tried to find those things within the walls of an organization. Now, it’s about creating those connections from the outside in.

As much as I despise this overused word, we are in the midst of a revolution. The good news is that it’s easy for everyone to participate. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to virtual networking. So feel free to jump on in - the “frictionless” organization may finally be here!

(Image courtesy of Flickr: by yesyesnono)

Posted March 24, 2008 by Chris Flanagan | Permalink | Comments (0)

BIF Research Advisor John Seely Brown on Learning 2.0 and why social networking matters to education

At a workshop last week I heard a staggering statistic referenced from the Kauffman Foundation that college graduates will have 4.2 jobs in the first 10 years after graduation. Wow - Clearly the days of a fixed, single-career are over. We now live in a world where everyone needs to acquire new knowledge and skills on an almost continuous basis.

I highly recommend an article co-written by BIF Research Advisor John Seely Brown and Richard P. Adler called Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail and Learning 2.0. I found it eye-opening. It's one of the most articulate arguments I've come across for for why we need to discontinue our persistent emphasis on traditional textbook learning and head towards new kinds of open, participatory and social learning environments:

"The emphasis on social learning stands in sharp contrast to the traditional Cartesian view of knowledge and learning—a view that has largely dominated the way education has been structured for over one hundred years. The Cartesian perspective assumes that knowledge is a kind of substance and that pedagogy concerns the best way to transfer this substance from teachers to students. By contrast, instead of starting from the Cartesian premise of “I think, therefore I am,” and from the assumption that knowledge is something that is transferred to the student via various pedagogical strategies, the social view of learning says, “We participate, therefore we are.”This perspective shifts the focus of our attention from the content of a subject to the learning activities and human interactions around which that content is situated."

The article also includes a number of examples highlighting the various new tools and applications for extending education through online social learning networks.

Get the article

Image Source: EduCause Article

Posted March 20, 2008 by Chris Flanagan | Permalink | Comments (0)

Event Reminder: Design Thinking, Beyond the Buzz Words

This is an event reminder that next week, leading design firm Continuum will be in the house. Join us on Thursday, March 27th, when Dan Buchner, Vice President of Innovation and Design and designers from Continuum will take us on an interactive journey into the world of design thinking.

We've all heard about it's power to create rewarding consumer experiences. And in recent years, design thinking has been taken out of its small industrial design context and applied to overall business and social processes. Today, it's fast morphing into a management methodology too. So what exactly is design-thinking? When is it most powerful? How is it best done? And most importantly, how can you capitalize on it? Through short lectures and quick moving, interactive work sessions, Continuum’s designers will take us through the process from concept to realization.

Registration details are here. Hope to see you there!

Posted March 19, 2008 by Chris Flanagan | Permalink | Comments (0)

Business Innovation Factory Welcomes Mickey Ackerman to Leadership Team

The Business Innovation Factory announced this week that industrial design guru Mickey Ackerman has signed on to oversee the next phase of development for BIF’s Experience Labs--BIF’s platform for conducting collaborative innovation projects that experiment with new ways to deliver value across traditional industry and organizational boundaries.

Ackerman, a professor at the Rhode Island School of Design, has spent decades teaching designers how to define problems clearly and then solve those problems through multidisciplinary teamwork. During his 15 years as head of the RISD industrial design department, Ackerman established a portfolio of sponsored projects where students used their skills to create real-world design solutions for industry leaders such as Intel, Rubbermaid, Frigidaire and General Mills.

During this same time, Ackerman established strategic partnerships between RISD and the Harvard Business School, MIT Sloan School of Management, MIT Age Lab and the Brown University School of Engineering. Ackerman also created partnerships with NASA, the NASA Center for Space Medicine at Yale University and Boston’s Center Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technology.

Applying this same skill set in a new way, Ackerman will work with the BIF team to strengthen the experience lab platform and enhance BIF’s strategy for managing a growing portfolio of collaborative innovation projects.

In a first phase of activity—set to begin in March and conclude in October—Ackerman will update BIF’s vision for the experience lab platform and oversee all activities related to experience lab operations. This will include the physical and virtual framework of the labs, project design and management techniques, staffing and partner arrangements, business development process, project economics, and improved integration of experience lab projects with other BIF activities.

Ackerman will also work with the BIF team to develop and launch the next set of projects to be run out of the experience labs.

“It is exciting to transition from being a spectator to what BIF is doing to being an active participant in the organization’s evolution and success,” says Ackerman. “It is essential that business, academia and government get better at solving problems in a collaborative way. The BIF Experience Lab platform is a powerful mechanism for redefining concepts of collaboration, communication, creative thinking, and customer service and, most importantly, what it means to be a sustainable innovator.”

The idea behind the BIF experience labs is simple: you can't innovate in a conference room. With its Experience Laboratories BIF has created a neutral platform where partners from across industries and disciplines can design and test innovation solutions and transfer what they learn back into their organizations.

Through the Experience Labs, BIF manages Collaborative Innovation Projects that enable innovators to:

• Test strategies to successfully design new business models
• Prototype innovative approaches and provide proof-of-concept findings
• Speed the larger scale roll-out of a new idea by understanding implementation realities.
• Learn how others face the challenges of innovation and implementation.
• Justify the return on innovation investment.

BIF currently runs four Experience Labs: Citizen, Patient, Student, and Consumer. Projects have included a pilot program to test how wireless solutions can be used to enhance public safety and education, a federally-funded project that transformed Rhode Island’s Narragansett Bay into a test bed for integrated port security communication networks, and an exercise to re-envision the primary care system.

BIF’s most recent project set out to re-design the hospital resuscitation or trauma "bay". This multi-disciplinary project team used a collaborative systems approach to develop models of the resuscitation bay's space, workflow, protocols and equipment. The team has taken what they learned in this initial phase of effort to create a full scale architectural and systematic model of what the trauma bay of the future might look like and is currently working with partners on a plan for next phase implementation of ideas developed during the project.

“After completing an initial series of projects, we are a perfect place to evaluate what we have learned and set an ambitious vision for what comes next,” says BIF founder and chief catalyst Saul Kaplan. “Having Mickey Ackerman on board to oversee this important activity is central to fulfilling BIF’s mission to enable collaborative innovation across the public and private sectors. We are grateful to have Mickey—a person of incredible talent and experience--as a partner in our efforts to take the BIF Experience Lab to the next level.”

Posted March 12, 2008 by Melissa Withers | Permalink | Comments (0)

Irving Wladawsky-Berger on the LIfe-Cycle of a Business

This is well worth a read:

A Delicate Balance by Irving Wladawsky-Berger

Irving just wrapped up his first semester teaching at MIT and managed to succinctly condense thirteen, three-hour seminars into a nice post. The seminar was about technology-based business transformation and he examined how companies can leverage emerging, major technologies to significantly transform a business or even a whole industry. There are so many factors that go into developing a business based on technologies as broad and complex as the Internet and in his post Irving talks about the delicate balance that exists within the life-cycle of a business:

Companies are born. Many don't make it beyond a few years, but some do and over time become leaders in their industries, with growing revenues and market share. Then, after a certain number of years, they start slowing down and stop innovating. At that point, the invisible hand of the marketplace will often deem the business to be more valuable as a kind of carcass for fast-growing new companies to feed on, rather than as an ongoing, viable institution. In other words - your time is up!!

We've heard ad nauseam that marketplace leaders must address any disruptive innovations being levied against the business model, otherwise, they risk obsolescence. This is easy to understand, yet difficult to embrace.

At the risk of sounding morbid, perhaps the delicate balance should ultimately reflect an organ donor model. Like people, business units have a life cycle. But important components can be saved to not only live another day but also evolve into the next big thing. (BIF research advisor Clay Christensen once told me to think of it like biological evolution: The population will evolve, even though individuals can't.)

All this gets back though to the one intractable issue for established companies and that's mindset. All the scientific arguments in the world can't change an entrenched culture. It's like telling a terminal cancer patient to just give up and accept the inevitable. And that just won't do.

There are no easy answers, which is why I wholeheartedly embrace an experimentation model that involves all parts of the business model - not just R&D.

RELATED
Irving Wladawsky-Berger spoke at our summit last October. His onstage interview with Wall Street Journal columnist Walt Mossberg was one of the highlights from our 2-day event. Watch the video here.

Posted March 07, 2008 by Chris Flanagan | Permalink | Comments (0)

Charting an Innovation Direction...The Eli Lilly Way

Lois Kelly of BeeLine Labs wrote recently about a conference she attended at Columbia University where Mark Kershisnik, the executive director of Eli Lilly's market research and US marketing services, spoke about his company’s innovation mission. Kershisnik said that Lilly’s sustainable success is rooted in a shared, common purpose that everyone in the global company is passionate about:

“Developing innovations to help patients succeed in the ways they want to lead their lives, which goes far beyond developing scientific innovations.”

“We exist to solve tough problems that help to get people healthy and earn a decent return on our investments. This is a deep-rooted belief throughout the company. This is what motivates us,” said Kershisnik.

Admittedly, at first blush, this sounds like marketing-speak but instead, Eli Lilly has developed the approaches, processes and programs that enable this innovation mission. (Both Lois and her colleague Francois Gossieaux have provided ample examples in their blogposts – well worth reading.) I was particularly moved by the company's oncology on canvas project, which enables cancer patients to express how they deal with their disease though stories and art. What's notable is that Lilly didn't start this community after launching a new oncology drug - they started it before having any oncology drug offering.

I write frequently about how companies can identify ways to make innovation a natural part of their organization in a method that is consistent and repeatable. And I also write how important it is to put the customer at the center of any innovation effort. Before you approach strategy, you've got to get clear on your intent. In other words, what problem are you trying to solve? For Eli Lilly, it was positioning the problem away from developing drugs to help sick people to developing drugs to help people lead healthy lives.

If you want to be strategic with innovation, if you want to get it to succeed and not be wasteful, the thing you need to do is concentrate your firepower around some kind of mission. It’s gratifying to see a giant pharmaceutical company actually walk the talk.

Posted March 06, 2008 by Chris Flanagan | Permalink | Comments (0)

Event Reminder: Ellen Levy on the Art of Mobilizing "Purposeful" Networks

This is an event reminder: Make the most out of your lunch hour and join us on Thursday, March 13th for a casual meet-up with entrepreneur and network impresario Ellen Levy. (The event is taking place at our very cool headquarters in Providence, Rhode Island.)

If you attended the BIF-3 summit, then you already know that Ellen is pure energy - she's a self-proclaimed opportunist who has an uncanny ability to make powerful connections between people and concepts. Over lunch, she'll discuss her experiences building purposeful networks — networks that go beyond social networking—that bridge across geographies, (business) cultures and topical areas. How do you bring together people pursuing similar interests and questions, but from very different backgrounds and perspectives? Ellen will answer this question and more on March 13th.

Some background on Ellen - she's currently the founding Managing Director at Silicon Valley Connect. Silicon Valley Connect is the umbrella company for most of Levy's initiatives these days, whether it is working as the Network Advisor to global venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, serving as a Deputy Chair for the Clinton Global Initiative, advising a handful of startup companies or working directly with Fortune 500 companies on their technology and innovation strategies.

Please note that while this event is free and open to our community, we have a limited number of seats and a deposit of $100 (by check or credit card) must be made. You will have your original check or credit card form returned at the event sign-in. If you are a "no show" for the event we will deposit your check or charge your credit card for the $100.

Registration details can be found here

I hope to see you there!

Related: Learn more about Ellen Levy

Posted March 03, 2008 by Chris Flanagan | Permalink | Comments (0)

Rhode Island's Bid to Become Technology Hub

Staff reporter Carolyn Porco of the Boston Globe wrote a great article last week on Rhode Island and its emergence as a hub for technology and innovation. I have to give her props - she uncovered activities here in the state that I wasn't even aware of - which furthers our rationale that Rhode Island as a high-tech hub is more than just an aspirational goal, it's quickly becoming reality.

In the words of our Chief Catalyst Saul Kaplan:

"We’re trying to create an innovation economy. The whole state is 1,000 square miles with 1 million people in it and we all know each other - in an innovation economy, that’s a huge advantage. Connecting the dots across sectors and silos is what innovation is all about, and we have the perfect real world test bed."

Place power is everything and here at the Business Innovation Factory we're building the models that weave together different disciplines to find a new tool box for business model innovation - one that addresses the systemic nature of problems. I firmly believe that the diversity of experience encountered here will lead to the understanding of the practices involved in institutionalizing innovation - and, just as important, translate those practices into higher-wage job opportunities for all Rhode Islanders.

Posted by Chris Flanagan | Permalink | Comments (0)