Front End of Innovation and Community 2.0

I'm at the Front End of Innovation and Social Media & Community 2.0 Strategies conferences in Boston this week. You can follow my tweets using the #feiboston and #socialc20 hash tags.

Nick Kinports (follow him on Twitter @ADMAVEN) has worked in the interactive technology world for over 9 years, and helps the Fortune 100 identify unmet consumer needs, create ideas to fill those needs, and bring them into market. He currently works at Maddock Douglas.

Why Companies Lack Successful Innovation - BusinessWeek

A shortage of innovation isn't always senior management's fault. Marketers deserve some blame for not having the right processes in place

By G. Michael Maddock and Raphael Louis Vitón

It is easy to blame chief executives and senior management for not devoting enough attention to introducing new products, but that is too simplistic an explanation for why radically new products are so rare. Marketers deserve some of the blame for at least three reasons:

Successful strategic innovations need more than a great idea.

There's no shortage of new product concepts. We are willing to bet you could come up with a handful of intriguing ones before lunch if you set your mind to it.

But new ideas by themselves are worthless. You need to move from idea to execution, and that is where the majority of companies stumble. You need a new-product development process—one that is codified, efficient, and repeatable, and which allows you to turn a notion into something you can sell.

But there aren't a lot of marketers who have tried to formalize a new-product introduction. Too often, marketers see their job as simply coming up with the idea. They leave the actual development and production to someone else and then profess to be surprised when the finished product is not exactly what they had envisaged. (This is true, by the way, whether we are talking about introducing new consumer products or selling business-to-business.) It is always nice to have someone else to blame when something goes wrong—such as, the product didn't sell. But it isn't the best use of your time, or of company resources.

The takeaway point from all this is that you want to create a process that will allow you to introduce a new product the same way every time. The procedure needs to be replicable—and easily understood internally—so you can train new hires to execute it. The process should become a legacy in your organization.

There is a shortage of Renaissance men (and women).

This builds off the previous point. As we have just seen, there are two distinct components to developing a successful new product: Coming up with the idea and then putting it into practice—i.e., executing it. We must make sure that it is produced exactly as designed and that the marketing that follows is consistent with the overall message the product is supposed to communicate. Failure can arise when we look for people who possess both skills, but in reality such people are extremely hard to find in any organization. Most people are naturally better at one or the other part of the process.

Instead of looking for someone who is good at both, it would seem more efficient to let people do what they do best. Since most companies have people who are fairly good at carrying out a mission once it is defined for them, it probably makes more sense to keep that capability in-house, and to look to outside resources to help you discover new ideas and fresh needs in the marketplace. Once the outside firm has unearthed those opportunities, the company can develop them.

Marketers tend to be fatalistic.

Marketers seem to go into new-product introductions with the expectation that they are going to fail. So they deal with new-product failures rather like the way an overweight person does with their problem: We periodically make half-hearted efforts to fix things…and then give up.

Just like someone who resigns himself or herself to being overweight, marketers conclude that there is nothing they can do to improve their batting average when it comes to introducing new products. Instead of throwing up their hands and saying "woe is me," they should be studying their past successes to see what they should do the next time they introduce something new.

That, of course, takes us full circle, underscoring as it does the need to have a replicable process to make new product development as painless as possible.

Blaming the CEO and others for not being more supportive about new product development is a waste of both time and mental energy. Look in the mirror and try to figure out how to make things better. Addressing the three problems we just talked about is a good start.

This article originally published in BusinessWeek

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Laugh a Little, Innovate a Lot - BusinessWeek

When looking for a big idea, you don't necessarily want to hear "Eureka!" but laughter

By
G. Michael Maddock and Raphael Louis Vitón

How much fun are you having at work these days? Let's face it. Having fun isn't as easy as it used to be, even for the most courageous, creative, and curious. Today just reading the headlines can turn an optimist into a fearful pessimist. The stories all seem to make you worry the very real possibility of losing your job.

Here is a critical insight for you. It is impossible for teams to innovate effectively while they are afraid. Impossible. Nothing kills great ideas like fear.

The good news is that fun is the antidote to fear. So if you are an innovation leader in a company that has become fearful, your people are on the road to failure unless you can change your culture. Cue the music, it's time to infuse some fun into the workplace.

The place to start? With you.

Leaders know how to laugh at themselves. Show us a person that can stand up in front of his team and say, "Call me stupid, but I have no idea how to do this," and we will show you a person with great leadership potential. Humble leaders with this trait create cultures that don't take themselves too seriously; cultures willing to take risks; cultures capable of creating and supporting a greater number of ideas.

The Daily Huddle

Why not start every day with a fun meeting? The daily huddle is simple practice that jump-starts the day and sets the stage for big ideas. Verne Harnish, "growth guy" and chief executive officer of Gazelles, which is an outsourced corporate university for midsize firms, taught us about the daily huddle. He developed the practice after studying and writing about John D. Rockefeller in his book The Rockefeller Habits.

Our company meets every day at 9 a.m. for no more than nine minutes. The agenda is simple. We share good news, bad news, and how well the company is doing. We use video to connect offices so everyone can attend the meeting. We encourage everyone to take a turn at running the huddle. Most importantly, we try to make them casual, transparent, and fun

In the last year, our daily huddles have included baby pools—where everyone guesses when someone's baby will be born; whether it will be a boy or girl and what it will weigh—costume contests, music trivia, engagement announcements, love poems, and ballads to welcome new employees. Yes, there is a lot of silliness, and not surprisingly, there is a lot of laughter. Much of the laughter has led to jokes, observations, and comments that have in turn led to ideas that have directly impacted our clients and company. (See www.bringchangehome.com, a viral marketing campaign with the humble goal of simply changing the world.

Says Harnish, "Of all the practices we teach, the daily huddle is probably the simplest and most powerful way to infuse fun, accountability, and momentum. When companies embrace the huddle, we always see a positive impact to their bottom line and culture.

Loosening Up the Suits

He's right. In fact, our clients actually like to come to these huddles. That should tell you something about the experience.

We first started noticing the liberating possibilities of linking fun and work in the early '90s in a meeting with an extremely conservative, extremely large utility company. You have probably been in a similar room; think suits; think fear; think awkward silence.

During this "mandatory" brainstorm session, someone offered up an idea as a joke. "I know," he said, tongue firmly in check. "We can send customers a bill that actually explains all the charges in plain English." He meant it as a joke, of course. And one joke led to another. Then something amazing happened: At one point the most senior person in the room commented, "You know, that's really not that bad of an idea. We could actually do that." Eventually the idea that started as a joke wound up being seen by 40 million consumers as a new kind of phone bill—one that was simple to understand. Not only did consumers embrace the joke, so did other phone companies who have adopted the idea. How great is that?

The Equation

There are two lessons here. First, it is not difficult to stage events that create this type of result, and leaders should be intentional about creating them. More important, we must learn to pay attention to laughter. Where there is laughter, there is an idea that holds people's interest. The pleasant by-product of all this: Work becomes more enjoyable, and that, too, increases the chance that you will be able to innovate successfully. It turns out that if you are having fun, you are more creative.

Here is an equation for you to consider the next time you are wondering why nobody is coming up with big ideas: I = F + H.

Ideas equal fun plus humility on the part of leadership to support the idea—and embrace those ideas that may come out of it.

This article originally published in BusinessWeek

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Future Trends 2009

Future Trends 2009, November 2-4, Miami, FL

Maddock Douglas will be represented at Future Trends 2009 by:

Greg DePalma, Senior Vice President of Innovation

Nick Kinports, Digital Integration Manager (@ADMAVEN)

G. Michael Maddock, Founding Partner

Michelle Oldham, Vice President of Innovation (@mahdlo1)

If you are attending, be sure to join us in Salon B (Track 1) on Tuesday, November 2, 2009 from 1:45-2:30PM for Michael Maddock's presentation on Trends from the Trenches: Tapping Networks to Find the Next Blockbusters.

For those of you unable to attend, get exclusive information on Future Trends 2009 by following Maddock Douglas on Twitter. We will post video of the full presentation on The Maddock Douglas Innovation Engine Blog as it becomes available.

About Future Trends 2009:

FT'09 is your opportunity to join industry experts, corporate visionaries, trendsetters and other revolutionaries to uncover and action the trends that matter most to your business, brand and service. Look not only into the immediate future and way ahead- where will we be in 50 years or more? And focus on making it relevant for your business - before others do. Lead your team to relate trends to make decisions, engage in real conversations, and create meaningful change.

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This article originally published in Technorati October 16, 2009.

In an industry with ever-dwindling sales and unmet consumer needs, major record labels still don’t get it.


It’s a sad state of affairs these days at the Big Four music groups (Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group, EMI, and Warner Music Group). The music industry as a whole has been hurt by the American recession, and there is little doubt consumers are spending less on everything from physical albums and their digital counterparts to merchandise and concert tickets.

But why does an industry suffering from year after year of shrinking sales refuse to innovate?

The answer: major record labels have failed to learn and practice modern marketing skills.

Example: Warner Music Group’s recent attempt to modernize their marketing efforts by selling advertising space before and after music videos.

Really, Warner? That’s the best you could come up with for your so-called "Web Strategy 2.0"?

In an era with social technologies, pull marketing, and word of mouth marketing taking center stage, revenue from physical album sales (the primary revenue stream of the major labels) is plummeting. The desperation amongst industry insiders is palpable as they realize a fundamental business model change is going to have to happen if the major labels are to survive another two to three years.

Labels need to focus on producing a product that their customers view as high quality at a price point that is fair, and then delivering that product to the channels consumers prefer (digital). That may seem like common sense, but it reflects the way the marketing and advertising industries have dramatically restructured to leverage emerging technology and trends in consumer behavior. Returning to the adage of building a high quality digital product with a good story backing it up is essential for anyone working the business to consumer angle in 2009.

As Nancy Jeffries, head of Creative Development and Licensing at MPL Music Publishing recently shared with me, "Great music, undiscovered, filtered and at great prices is what’s called for now."

Digital Rights Management issues aside, unless major labels get their acts together by hiring in fresh, talented marketers - and taking them seriously - we don’t have much to look forward to from Hollywood in the coming years, nor can we expect to have any kind of say in the low brow, Auto-Tuned, airy music dominating Billboard’s top lists.

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