Yesterday Samsung showcased its new iPad contender, the Samsung Galaxy Tab. As this comparison chart shows the product is a serious - albeit currently only - real competitor. It has also things that the Apple iPad does not have, notably:

• front and rear facing cameras
• Adobe flash support
• expandable storage
• GPS built in (iPad only in UMTS model)
• full multitasking support

The following list of books is what we read and can recommend. Each of them has a different focus and intentions:

Innovation, Kreativitaet und Ideenfindung (Helmut Schlicksupp)

This book is a must-read for everyone interested in obtaining an overview and practical guide to idea creation methodologies. The language is very precise and makes this book easy to read. The author shows with this book a lot of competency. Helmut Schlicksupp ceased away beginning of 2010, way too young. He seems to me one of the major contributors to this subject and being recognized also internationally as I could read about him in books published in the US e.g.

Innovationsmanagement, Die 6 Phasen von der Idee zur Umsetzung

This book is in German too. It is a good, brief summary of many other books that I have read but does a good job with it. It shows a six phase innovation management process in a simple and straight forward way. Its focus is on phase 3 “Grobkonzept” which has 60 pages alone of the 150 page total. Idea creation (phase 2) and market entry (phase 6) are quite short which is a bit surprising since these are the most challenging phases in my practical experience as a product and business development manager. You can also see that the book was written by innovation management consultants who give many tips on how to run innovation management workshops using these methodologies in companies.

The innovator’s toolkit - 50+ Techniques for Predictable and Sustainable Organic Growth

Very nicely illustrated book that contains all the major techniques one would need in practical assignments and many more. The book is a US style textbook and as such a pleasure to read. Something I never understood why students in the US can enjoy so much better quality literature compared to their e.g. German student colleagues at German universities. I was once told that the reason for that is that in the US assistant professors have to also make money with book writing and selling since they are not as well paid as in Europe. That then means that they need to think about how to best present, explain and illustrate to attract many student buyers. I wish we would have had that system when I was a student long time ago…

[Photo by Clark Little]

Last night Urs Hölzle, Senior Vice President Operations & Google Fellow, wrote in the official Google blog that they will stop the Google Wave project and the attempt to try to create a product out of it.

Some have foreseen this happening already in October 2009 such as Robert Scoble in his highly visible blog post “Google Wave crashes on beach of overhype“. He criticized the total overload of information that Google Wave creates making it unusuable as a practical work tool. Of course Google hoped that the developer community would fix this and come up with creative ways but that has not happened either.

Product development can be supported but not totally handled by the public community. What Google should have known and for sure learned from the Wave project now is that you need to set a clear direction still and have a strong product to start out, with a clear value.

What amazes me about this end is the fact that many got caught by total surprise with this announcement. I could still hear just a few weeks ago during a client meeting that also Google Wave would possibly be a candidate for a community platform solution and some folks predicted even the end of email and collaboration tools when Wave is in full swing. Nope, not so fast.

Failed innovations often make you learn much more than successful ones. That remains here now as a positive and of course some valuable public source code also that can be used in other projects to come.

Google keeps innovating and also stopping failed innovations such as this one or the NexusOne mobile phone business model. This approach is much better than sitting and waiting for others to make a first move and then copying it. Only with such a pro-active approach can one land the next big IT wave project and failures are a common part of active innovations not to be feared at all - in contrary.

Just came across this interesting - but not totally surprising  - survey result from a study undertaken by Kienbaum: of 524 valuable ideas that were created in the companies surveyed, 95 (18%) were so called breakthrough ideas. Of these 95 breakthrough ideas, only 5% originated within the companies. 10% were found in spare time while together with others and 85% (!) in spare time while alone.

The question that naturally arises is: how do companies encourage or enable employees to submit ideas like this when the vast majority come up in spare time? Or one could also ask if you can improve the ratio of breakthrough ideas found at work by offering better facilities or special incentives? What comes to mind here of course right away is Google who not only provide their employees with nice working environments but also grant them one day per week to work on their own ideas.

Another - also cheaper - way to solve this challenge would be to offer access to idea creation tools from remote and via mobiles as well.

Brainstorming is well known as a way to create new ideas in a group setting starting out with lots of initial ideas to a defined topic and only later on select the best with analytical methods.

While brainstorming sessions have not been scientifically proven to be superior its electronic form seems to offer improvements that make a difference. Incentives are an important part of it and so are other motivational elements. The ideal seems a combination of group work while still being able to work on ideas quietly on your own. Online forums with built-in incentives and motivational features are therefore worth exploring by companies. The use within businesses seems endless. E.g. in sales and marketing, strategy, product management, product development to name the obvious ones.

The traditional well-known brainstorming rules still need to be followed of course, these are:

• No critique is allowed during the brainstorming exercise. This needs to be deferred to a later phase.
• Ideas of others need to be further worked on by everybody and tried to improve. It is key to work on the positive aspects only. That way good ideas can be further improved by the group.
• Free wheeling is desired, anything goes. Cross-functional input and input from non-experts is desired here as they might see things from a totally different and possibly interesting new way than the so called experts.
• Try to find as many ideas as possible, so focus is on quantity first and only in another phase then also work on the quality. This part requires some training and getting used to in particular process oriented employees might have a problem here.

Many companies realize now that creative people are in fact the future of their operations. To do business processes highly optimized is something that reaches at some point its end and of course can be copied also relatively easily. In fact large Chinese companies have already many years ago used western companies like IBM to optimize their business processes. So what does that mean for global competitiveness? Only the innovative and marketing-savvy companies will have a chance. Both requires creative people, and with that not people with arts skills are meant but people who can come up with new and better ideas and constantly question the status quo.

I came across this list below that shows empirically proven attributes of creative people. But one warning upfront: While this list can serve as a first measure, human beings are too complex and different and also a creative person does not have to have all these attributes of course. What creativeness means for each business is different too and cannot be judged generically. Lastly, don’t try to immitate these attributes to look creative, that of course does not work either. Creativity can be learned and trained though and like everything else the easiest during childhood.

• open and critical attitude towards the business environment
• independence from conventional and traditional views
• preference for new things
• ability to see things under different aspects
• ability to cope with conflicts from what is being observed  vs. what is currently being done
• preference for complex situations and varied stimuli
• ability to work persistently on a solution
• concentration on the solution of a task and not on obtaining recognition and fame
• energetic, initiative, success-oriented
• courageous, independent
• socially introverted, focused on its own
• emotionally stable
• dominant, could also be aggressive
• high sense for responsibility
• asthetic
• less developed social and religious values
• sensitive and differentiated reaction to the business environment
• humorous

[from Gisela Ulmann]

I am reading an excellent book on how to do Productive Thinking in a business setting: Think Better by Tim Hurson. In essence he describes a sophisticated systematic way how to better do brainstorming sessions combined with critical thinking to come to creative answers. In the six step process he uses step 3 is the most important one: What’s the Question?  Quoting Peter Drucker:

The most serious mistakes are not being made as a result of wrong answers. The truly dangerous thing is asking the wrong question.

I think that this is an entirely correct statement and also in my experience the most common reason why initiatives such as in marketing, sales or product design, product development fail is that the wrong questions have been asked to formulate the challenge or problem and then all efforts are targeted at solving the wrong problem.

Tim Hurson writes that the ultimate question - a truly Catalytic Question - must be figured out first and unless you don’t do that it doesn’t matter how good the rest of your work is.

Idea management software solutions such as the one we represent - Kindling - are excellent tools to not only find ideas but also find the right questions to start with before all efforts are made to try to solve the wrong or not core issue.

This last week I received an email response from a large Swiss company’s head of administration and secretary of the CEO saying:

Innovationsideen werden bei xyz in klar definierten Prozessen aufgenommen, beurteilt und je nach Einschätzung in Projekten weiter verfolgt. Die Projekte werden in IT-Systemen dokumentiert und kontrolliert. (Innovation ideas at xyz company will be entered into clearly defined processes, evaluated and depending on the overall judgement followed up in projects. The projects will be documented and controlled with IT.)

This sounds reasonable at first sight but is actually a very common attitude to believe that a well oiled process and quality control system would be enough to generate ideas and innovations in an enterprise. But as e.g. Nicolas Negroponte said: ” Incrementalism is innovation’s worst enemy.”

The reason is that all these process methodologies are on one hand the most useful form of reproductive thinking in that it focuses on continually monitoring and refining processes, products and procedures but also the most dangerous in that it provides the illusion of innovation under the guise of incremental change. All these methodologies may be good for producing zero defects, but they will never produce breakthrough change. For that it requires productive thinking.

Innovation and marketing are well-known as the key elements of successful entrepreneurship. “Cognitive style” is an individual’s preferred approach for solving problems and can be measured along a continuum from adaptive to innovative. To put it more catchy: adaptors are more inside-the-box thinking and innovators are more into outside-the-box thinking. For innovation projects to be successful you need a mix of both innovators and adaptors though. A simple way to find out if someone is more innovator or adaptor you can ask the following questions:

• Are established rules, assumptions, and structures questioned?
• Does the person become frustrated or annoyed with details?
• Does the person create lots of ideas without asking too much about how these can be implemented?

If all three questions are answered with a “yes” then the person is - obviously - more an innovator than adaptor.

To more quantify the degree of innovative vs. adaptive personality you can use the Kirton-Innovation (KAI) Inventory instrument. There are 33 statements that one has to respond to which will lead to a score between 32 (most adaptive) and 160 (most innovative) on a normally distributed numerical scale. More details on the subject you can also find on their website and in this video.

In innovation projects a good common sense approach is to let the innovative people lead the opportunity-identification and ideation phases while those who are more adaptive ones can lead the design and implementation phases. That way you also keep them separated since these two personality extremes are also hard to integrate and have work together unless there is a so called “bridger” who manages the ideation exercise. That person should lie in between adaptors and innovators and as such can help to overcome communication and other barriers to progress.