So Woodward researched the concept of innovation -- what it looks like, how it's achieved and how an organization can incorporate it into its culture. "You can't just flip a switch," he says.
His research culminated in the January launch of a 16-week program that takes participants on a carefully planned but ultimately open-ended ride to becoming innovators. The 16 participants are divided into four groups, and each team is handed a challenging business problem to resolve. All are then deliberately exposed to new influences far from the comfort of their cubicles. For instance, they are immersed in the work of users in relevant hospital departments, listen to guest speakers and go on thought-provoking field trips such as a visit to the MIT AgeLab. While in the program, they are completely mobile, operating with just a laptop, a handheld device and a common meeting space shared with other program participants.
The hoped-for result? Individual metamorphosis, the rise of an innovation culture in IT and maybe even proposed solutions to the assigned business problems.
Serious Business
Partners' program illustrates just how seriously some organizations are taking innovation. Although innovation has always been important, there's a renewed emphasis on right-brained approaches to succeeding in today's increasingly global, hypercompetitive, unforgiving business world.
"There has been an understandable focus on efficiency and globalization and outsourcing," says Jim Eichner, vice president of advanced technology at Pitney Bowes Inc. in Stamford, Conn. "But a lot of those things have played out to a large degree. People are wondering how to differentiate themselves, and they have to innovate to do that."
"After the dot-com bust, companies kind of went internal," notes Sally Grant, CIO at the California State Automobile Association (CSAA) in San Francisco. "But efficiency and process are not going to take us to greatness." Or to put it another way, "You can't downsize to success," says Scott Anthony, a partner at Innosight LLC, a consultancy in Watertown, Mass.
But the goal is not innovation for its own sake; a key element of current efforts is to stop reacting to what customers are demanding and start anticipating their needs even before they've had a chance to articulate them.
Examples of this business trend include The Procter & Gamble Co.'s Swiffer, a replacement for the old broom-and-mop routine, and Earthbound Farm 's prewashed salad mixes. "It's about changing the status quo and delivering something of such value that users adopt it and thereby change what's 'normal,'" says Tom Andrews, a principal at Stone Yamashita Partners, a consultancy in San Francisco.
What does all this mean for IT? Well, just as businesses need to differentiate their brands, IT also needs to prove its worth, and it can leverage innovation to accomplish that goal. "IT has to think of themselves like a stand-alone business," says Joyce Wycoff, co-founder of Innovation Network, a consultancy in Bakersfield, Calif. "Somehow, they have to come up with a vision that both excites them and creates value for their customers."
But for many IT managers, telling their organizations to be innovative is about as helpful as telling someone to have a nice day. It's pretty easy to imagine a few eye rolls among people who have already watched their organizations jump on other expensive and not-always-successful management theory bandwagons.
That's why jump-starting a culture of innovation goes far beyond pinning slogans on walls. For one thing, it's important to create a process for innovation that's distinct from linear project management efforts, which, as Andrews points out, are optimized for decisions, not for trying out new ideas.
This means replacing familiar steps like planning, analysis, design, construction and quality testing with new ones like problem framing, status quo questioning, observation synthesis, hypothesis mapping, prototyping and feedback-gathering.
Key to the process is directing your efforts at a question or problem that you're trying to resolve. Although you want people to think outside the box, you need to impose some type of constraint or else you get what Wycoff calls the "popcorn effect" -- wild ideas bouncing around with no purpose in sight. "The old mind-set was to create a bunch of ideas, get out of the box and let the creativity flow," she says. "But now we realize it's better to spend a lot of upfront time defining what we want to do and exacting criteria for success."
For instance, when developing Partners' innovation program, Woodward polled directors on long-standing business issues they wanted to address. He came up with four: improving patients' telephone interaction with the hospital, establishing a regional data exchange for hospitals to share information, providing better trend data on chronic illnesses and learning how to commoditize Partners' IT infrastructure.
The best way to know what problems exist is to experience firsthand how customers interact with the products and services you offer. "If you look at a highly innovative organization, the first characteristic you see is awareness -- awareness of the needs that need to be fulfilled and of the know-how that's around you," says Robert Price, former CEO of Control Data Corp. and author of The Eye for Innovation: Recognizing Possibilities and Managing the Creative Enterprise (Yale University Press, 2005).
At Amazon.com Inc., for instance, the mantra is, "Start with the customer and work backwards," says Werner Vogels, CIO at the Web retailer. Technology staffers are also regular users of the site, and most undergo a training program in which they take customer calls and respond to e-mails. At weekly meetings, they review e-mails that customer service has received and address frequent questions. "People have to feel responsible that we're really serving customers," Vogels says.
Similarly, when Pitney Bowes wanted to develop a next-generation call center system to improve interaction between customer service representatives and callers, it had IT staffers spend weeks in the call center, listening to calls and studying staff needs.
In innovation circles, embedding yourself within a community of people to see the world through their eyes is sometimes referred to as "ethnography," and it's highly encouraged. "For the IT department to be motivated by true human insight is a wonderful thing," Andrews says.
The idea for JetBlue Airways Corp.'s "paperless cockpit" germinated from just that type of insight, says Todd Thompson, CIO at the Forest Hills, N.Y.-based airline. "It came from sitting in the cockpit and seeing pilots pull out books from those heavy cases they carry around," he says. And after sitting in on morning meetings with managers while they continuously reviewed operations statistics -- such as average baggage-retrieval or airplane-turnaround time -- IT also developed a dashboard system that pushes that data in real time to their desktops.
After all, Anthony points out, much of innovation is facilitating the jobs users are already trying to accomplish -- not enabling them to do something new. "You need to find stuff that customers haven't raised their hands yet to talk about," says Tom Kelley, general manager of Ideo Inc., a design consultancy in Palo Alto, Calif.
Looking Outside
Users aren't the only place to turn for ideas, however. Companies striving to be innovators also look outside their four walls for inspiration. Not only does this get the creative juices flowing by forcing people out of their usual way of seeing things, but it also may help you find someone who has already tackled a problem you want to solve.
P&G has famously established a practice of "open innovation" by connecting with outside experts and partners, with the goal of getting 50 percent of its new ideas from outside the company. And no wonder: A late-2005 Booz Allen Hamilton Inc. study of 1,000 worldwide public companies shows no relationship between higher levels of research and development spending and high levels of growth, enterprise profitability and shareholder return.
And it just makes sense. "If you think of innovation as problem-solving and you're the problem-solver, you'll take help wherever you find it," Price says.
Some project teams visit museums or hardware stores or invite in guest speakers and performers -- even mimes -- for inspiration, Wycoff says. Or they look for an example of a company that's facing a similar issue but in a different industry or environment. For instance, participants in Partners' innovation program will visit companies outside the health industry, such as Fidelity Investments, State Street Corp. and P&G, for inspiration. Woodward can also imagine sending people to Google Inc.'s headquarters to help figure out how to commoditize Partners' own IT infrastructure.
"You need to think of your company as an ecosystem," Vogels says. "You want to leverage the intellectual power of the larger community. There might be a student in a dorm room with a bright idea [about] Amazon.com, and we'd like to foster that."
Pitney Bowes has benefited by reaching out to what might seem like strange bedfellows. After studying Web purchasing, the IT department collaborated with eBay Inc. as well as its own product development and marketing groups to carve out a niche for the company's otherwise traditional business. It developed a system through which eBay sellers can download postage and shipping labels. "Great companies get people together," Kelley says.
But diversity can also be found within a company, where hiring practices can encourage a wide range of input. At CSAA, Grant likes to hire staffers who reflect the makeup of the company's membership. "If you have a diverse workplace, you will get excellent input," she says.
At JetBlue, the company purposefully tries to hire at least some people from outside the airline industry, Thompson says. And at Partners, Woodward took pains to choose people for the organization's innovation projects who had no previous experience dealing with the business problem at hand. "We didn't want people to have preconceived notions," he says. "It's a risk and a higher learning curve, but we think it's worth it."
Celebrate Failure
Businesses often find it hard to accept that innovation goes hand in hand with failure. "On a good day, nine out of 10 efforts will fail," Andrews says. "You want the failures to be as good a learning experience as the successes."
But doing that means changing the way companies view and even how they talk about unsuccessful projects. For instance, Andrews says, you might talk about a "failed idea" but not a "failed team." Instead of talking about "killing" an idea or project, refer to it as "putting it on the back burner." And if someone comes to you with an idea, don't point out all the things that are wrong with it; ask the person how they can make it even better for the customer, giving it a chance to morph into something successful. This attitude can promote thoughtful risk-taking because people will be less afraid of presenting ideas without a lot of data to back themselves up, Andrews says.
In fact, innovative companies often celebrate failure -- literally. W.L. Gore Associates Inc., best known as the developer of Gore-Tex fabric, is known to end unsuccessful projects with champagne. Others hold "failure parties" in which refreshments are served and managers share with the staff their own failed project experiences.
Some use humor. After a new in-flight snack idea was tested on JetBlue and then quickly jettisoned, "no one was fired or deeply chagrined," Thompson says. In fact, the episode became an entertainment device, as a picture of the innovator was posted on the company intranet, along with a contest to write an essay on why the change was silly. "There's a cultural acceptance that we're going to make mistakes once in a while if we're going to be innovative," Thompson says.
In the end, innovation is a slippery concept, demanding chaos and discipline, process and flexibility, New Age approaches and old-fashioned common sense. After all, the motivation to innovate often emanates from the everyday thought, "There has to be a better way." Says Price: "It's about really giving a damn about something and being determined to find the know-how to help you with that problem."
Brandel is a Computerworld contributing writer in Newton, Mass. Contact her at marybrandel@verizon.net.
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Start today
An innovation culture doesn't happen overnight, but there are things you can begin to do today to encourage innovation and creativity.
Look for duct tape. Gain insight into unspoken customer needs by spending just a little time in their environment. Joyce Wycoff, co-founder of Innovation Network , suggests looking for places where duct tape or yellow stickies have been applied, or where a user has kludged something together to accomplish a task.
Act on direct observation. Schedule one day a month for IT staffers to spend with users and let that experience inform the work they do, suggests Tom Kelley, general manager at Ideo. After six months, "I'm willing to bet IT's perceived value will go up," he says.
Adopt a "reverse mentor." Ask a younger worker to keep you apprised of trends outside your purview, Kelley says. The practice has helped him understand blogging, podcasting and even why younger people don't tend to wear watches (answer: cell phones keep perfect time).
Do brain exercises. Brainstorm with people in different industries. Analogies from architecture or surgery might apply to your own problem.
Read. Other creative-thinking techniques are suggested at www.thinksmart.com and by Barry Nalebuff and Ian Ayres in their book, Why Not? How to Use Everyday Ingenuity to Solve Problems Big and Small (Harvard Business School Press, 2003). For instance, look for solutions in other contexts that can apply to your own, like "flipping" things, as both Heinz and Hunt's did with ketchup bottles to improve ease of use.
Create a "war room." "Teams need a place to continually come back to that's not torn down at the end of the day," says Tom Andrews, a principal at Stone Yamashita Partners . It has to be private enough for them to post strategy maps, hypotheses, insights and ideas on the walls or on whiteboards. "It gives you the ability to scan the material and make connections in a vastly more superior way than through language or a PowerPoint document," he says. "It's vital to have a collective memory."
SIDEBAR
Sidebar: How we do it
Amazon.com Inc.
According to CIO Werner Vogels, Amazon.com can never stop pushing the limits of innovation in the areas in which it excels, such as search, personalization and fulfillment. "All these areas require enormous innovation to remain successful," he says.
To support that charter, the whole notion of IT at Amazon.com is purposefully vague. "There's no clear separation between the business and IT," Vogels says.
Instead, IT is organized into small, loosely coupled groups. These are dubbed "two-pizza teams," given that they are generally no larger than what you could feed with two pizzas, Vogels explains.
Each team is completely autonomous in developing an idea and is responsible for everything from scoping the problem to actually operating the service that implements the idea.
This brings the team into close contact with the customer that is using its service and allows for a very fast feedback loop to improve on the innovation.
Key to making this a successful model, Vogels says, is to hire technologists who thrive on working in small teams with equally talented people.
JetBlue Airways Corp.
The way Todd Thompson, CIO at JetBlue, sees it, everything the company does is innovative, from e-ticketing to the televisions in each seat back. "We set out specifically to change the way customers experience the airline," he says.
To support that goal, teams within IT are aligned with business groups, and a project manager is assigned to each business department. IT workers spend at least one day per month embedded with users. That way, Thompson says, "when they talk about checking in a customer or what it's like in the cockpit, we know what that means."
JetBlue keeps its development process light through quick prototyping and rapid development methods, as well as Microsoft's .Net architecture, Web services and object-oriented methods.
The IT group is always ready to respond quickly to good new ideas. Thompson boasts that high-impact/low-effort projects can blast from charter to execution in one day.
For JetBlue, innovation is a make-or-break proposition. "The industry is so competitive, we've had to do things differently," Thompson says. "A key to our ability to innovate is to understand customer needs on a rubber-meets-the-road basis and recommend technology initiatives that improve the experience of crew members and customers."
Pitney Bowes Inc.
For the seven years he's worked at Pitney Bowes, Jim Eichner, vice president of advanced technology, has met quarterly with company executives to review what's happening with technology and innovation within the company. What has changed in the past four years is the emphasis on customer-centric innovation.
"We have a heavy focus on getting out of the lab and going to customer sites, using tools borrowed from anthropology to understand customers in their world, such as observing people, artifacts, settings, relationships and work process," Eichner says.
Those observations are used to create a hypothesis of a customer need, followed by a brainstorming process that leads to what Eichner calls a low-fidelity prototype. This is a system or device that can be built in a couple of days and put in front of customers to generate feedback.
This feedback helps create a value proposition, which often results in new product development. In addition, all ideas serve a pre-existing strategic opportunity, such as how to get people who now use stamps to start using metered mail.