innovationmanagement

Keeping up with the Joneses just got harder, with Facebook finally flipping the switch on its new Timeless Apps that make it easier to share every fleeting moment of your fabulous life with each and every one of your friends. The gossip and invidious comparison that goes on between Facebook friends ... Read More

The employment pendulum seems to be swinging back to the employee side. How does this impact your team? Now's a good time to look again at what employees - and business leaders - want and need. Continue reading →

Apple's current biggest problem is not the next iPhone. It is the 100 billion dollar problem. Microsoft had been criticized for years for having too much cash and not putting them to use. They eventually started paying dividend starting 2003. With Apple's war chest hitting $100 billion soon (currently around $98 billion but was originally estimated to be $60 billion)...

Creating a new category. The Holy Grail of Innovation. The Holy Grail of entrepreneurs. It’s when you can create a new category that you command the skies. Think of the iPad. Is it a new category? Continue reading →

This concludes the survey by the Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM), the global community of information professionals, authored by Andrew McAfee, a principal research scientist at the MIT Sloan Center for Digital Business and the AIIM Task Force on Social Business and Innovation.

I tend to not like offering up checklists as blog posts, you know those one hundred and one ideas for this or that, although I have to admit I like collecting them as a kick-starting resource. Today I decided to change my mind, Why? The Innovation Champion has many jobs-to-be-done and I felt this would be a useful 'sparking point' to recognize the innovation jobs involved. Continue reading →

Marlowe gathers the Accipiter executives to sit in on enthusiastic open innovation software demonstrations. Will the team arrive at the necessary conclusions about their innovation community?

A KIN Innovation Communities Case Study

The Knowledge Center for Innovation (KCI) is housed at the Technion’s Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management in Israel.  Founded in 2008, KCI aims to accelerate innovation by disseminating information and knowledge, fostering collaboration, and establishing a network of researchers, business people and policy makers.

The KCI is part of a broader Israeli Government program supporting the creation of “Infrastructural Knowledge Centers” in a variety of fields, primarily in high tech and medicine.  Knowledge centers serve as a hub for research papers and resources, as well as coordinating activities among participants in different fields.  Unlike other knowledge centers, which tend to focus on high technology industries, KCI focuses on the interface between high-tech and low-tech companies (food, textiles, banking, etc.) that do not invest a lot in R&D.

KCI programs today include:

• Industry-Academia R&D consortia
• Student projects focused on innovation challenges in industry
• Educational programs for innovation management
• Consulting engagements
• The Managing for Innovation forum where both high-tech and low-tech companies build their skills through expert input and sharing best practices.

The “Managing Innovation Forum” (MIF) is a new KCI activity, started in 2010, that is most germane to the focus of the KIN Innovation Communities project in that it is aimed squarely at business leaders learning from each other about improving innovation management.  40-45 companies are involved in MIF, representing both high tech and low tech firms, and both large and small companies.  Some companies are competitors, but, unlike many such networks, MIF does not shy away from that.  KCI leadership wishes to promote the idea that competitors can also be collaborators and strive to create an environment in which that can happen.   As the KCI has evolved, there has been increasing attention to making sure that participants from particular companies or industries do not only talk to each other but also interact with and support colleagues from unfamiliar industries.

There are 8-10 MIF meetings per year.  In general, the same people come from the companies, so there is a continuity of interactions.  A typical meeting begins with a lecture by a CEO or industry or academic expert.  Then there is a break for dinner, and afterwards smaller groups engage in a “live case study” of a real company or industry issue, sitting around a table.   One goal of this less formal interaction is to begin building relationships between high-tech and low-tech companies, fostering cross-fertilization of best practices in innovation.

One topic for future work may be improving management in general in Israel.  The Israeli ecosystem is well suited for building new businesses—as highlighted in the popular book Start-Up Nation—but not as well for managing large enterprises.  However, this may be changing as international companies locate in Israel and bring in management talent that mix with Israeli managers.

Editor’s Note: This is the second in a series of case studies on Innovation Communities being created by the Kellogg Innovation Network here at Innovation Excellence. They would sincerely appreciate it if you would contact them if you know about INets that they should consider including in their database. If you’re a leader of an INet, they will invite you to join a gathering of INet leaders that they hope to arrange next year, to review the findings of the study and take this research to the next level: What are lessons to be learned in creating INets and making them successful? It’s kind of the meta-meta level. Innovation results are the base. INets are the first meta level, which is learning about how to manage innovation to produce results. And if we can form a network of INets, that will be about learning about how to produce powerful new learning environments.

To participate in KIN’s research, please fill out their data form and they will contact you!

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Mike Lippitz is a Research Fellow with the Center for Research in Technology and Innovation at the Kellogg School of Management in Evanston, Illinois, a Senior Policy Analyst with the Institute for Defense Analyses in Washington, DC., and a Principal at Clareo Partners LLC.  Prior positions include Special Assistant for Strategic Technology Planning in the Office of Director for Defense Research and Engineering, US Department of Defense and product line manager at Hewlett-Packard Company.

There are two popular quotes that often get used when discussing innovation that were never actually said or written by the people to whom they are attributed. Despite the fact that they are fake quotes, there are still things that we can learn from them.

The first common quote is attributed to Henry Ford:

If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.

This quote usually comes up when people are discussing focus groups, or design-driven innovation. However, there’s no evidence that Ford ever said or wrote it.

Even though it’s not a real quote, it raises some interesting points. You can interpret it as meaning “you should ignore customers,” or some people even seem to think it means “customers are stupid.”

But that’s not really what it’s saying at all. People do have limited vision if you ask them open-ended questions. And as innovators, our job is to invent the future. Nevertheless, there is useful information in the faster horses idea.

If people really had told Ford that they wanted faster horses, what would that mean? If you frame it in a jobs-to-be-done way, it means that the main job that they’re trying to do is to get somewhere fast. That actually is a pretty good argument in favour of automobiles.

In his HBR post on this topic, Patrick Vlaskovits sums up the issue well:

An innovator should have understanding of one’s customers and their problems via empirical, observational, anecdotal methods or even intuition. They should also feel free to ignore customers’ inputs. Because by now it should be clear that Ford’s adherence to his vision of the mass-market car and how to materialize that vision was instrumental in both his early success in growing Ford Motor Company as well as his later failure to respond in a timely and effective manner to rapid innovation in the marketplace.

The real lesson learned was not that that Ford’s failure was one of not listening to his customers, but of his refusal to continuously test his vision against reality, which led to the Ford Motor Company’s failure of continuous innovation, resulting in a catastrophic loss of market share from which it never recovered.

So the quote is useful, even if Ford never said it.

The second quote is a bit more problematic – this one is frequently attributed to Charles Darwin:

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.

As with the Ford quote, Darwin never actually said or wrote this (he never wrote “survival of the fittest” either – that was Herbert Spencer building on Darwin). This one is a bit more problematic too, because it is actually a major misinterpretation of Darwin.

Consider the Large Ground Finch, one of the species from the Galapagos Islands described by Darwin:

In a remarkable research project that has spanned nearly 40 years now, Peter and Rosemary Grant have studied the evolution of Darwin’s Finches in the Galapagos (the work was beautifully described in The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Timeby Jonathan Weiner – a terrific book).

Here is their key finding. When times are good, there is wide variation in the beaks of the finches. However, the Galapagos are subject to the El Niño/La Niña weather cycles, which means that they have frequent droughts. In times of drought, the finch populations dive. In the case of the Large Ground Finch,the individuals that survive these events have the biggest beaks. Why? Because the bigger beaks enable them to crack larger seeds, which would be ignored as too hard to crack when there are plenty of seeds around.

In other words, it is precisely the strongest of the species that survives.

The fake Darwin quote is completely wrong with regard to which individuals survive. But it might tell us something about which species survive. The reason that Large Ground Finches have been around for as long as they have is that there is enough variation in the species that whenever conditions are extreme, some individuals in the population will be able to adapt to the change.

If we apply this to innovation, you might think of it this way: products are like individuals and organisations are like species. To do well, products need to be the best at getting some job done for some group of customers.

However, for an organization to do well over time, it needs to be adaptable. This means that unless its environment is unusually stable, it needs to generate variety. Even though economic evolution is directed by the choices that people make, we still don’t have much control over which ideas work and which don’t. Or over which take off, and which never really click.

To maintain variety, to improve responsiveness to change, we must experiment.

Why have these two quotes become so widespread? It’s not the internet – both incorrect attributions were made in books. Both quotes are catchy and short, and they capture ideas that seem like they reflect what Ford and Darwin thought. Even though the Darwin quote is not very Darwinian, it reflects a very common misinterpretation.

The catchiness is one thing, but also, we like to argue from authority. If we don’t want to run focus groups, it’s easier to get Henry Ford to make the argument than it is for us to do it ourselves.

I wanted to think through these quotes for a couple of reasons. One is that they do offer some useful lessons. The second is that we need to figure out how to make compelling arguments ourselves – this is the key to getting our own ideas to spread.

(The superb Large Ground Finch photo is from flickr/Steven Bedard under a Creative Commons License)

This is the sixth in a series of articles that describe the unique traits of a corporate intrapreneur.

The previous habit (3-box time management) described the first step required to deliver upon an idea in a large corporation.

The next habit is an unusual and counter-intuitive technique that enables an intrapreneur to continue the delivery of their idea. Visibility management (often referred to as visibility avoidance) is depicted below as the next step in the cycle.

Visibility avoidance – not actively publicizing one’s talents – seems to be incongruent with climbing the corporate ladder. Doesn’t everybody want to be recognized for their great ideas and promoted to higher levels of responsibility?

Intrapreneurs, quite simply, need not. Their intrinsic passion for the generation and delivery of ideas is their main reason for coming to work every day. They fill their time with trips to the lab to debug alongside their teammates. They close themselves inside remote conferences rooms and collaborate on whiteboards. They spend hours on their laptops, searching high and low for new sources of learning on the latest technologies. They visit local customers to check on their configurations.

They are not motivated by rewards and recognition from others. They are rewarded by the process that they have created for themselves.

This sort of self-motivation does not leave a lot of time for the bureaucratic meetings that are so common at large corporations. Intrapreneurs who find themselves lassoed in these types of meetings recognize they are jeopardizing the core value that is the hallmark of any intrapreneur: productivity. They understand that certain forms of recognition by executive management are accompanied by the unwelcome trappings of inefficient assignments and endless, countless meetings.

While they eschew recognition by executives, they strive for visibility with the builders in the trenches.

As a result of maintaining the delicate balance between maximizing trench visibility and minimizing corporate visibility, many intrapreneurs have adopted a “plus 2” approach to recognition within the corporation. They create extremely strong bonds of trust with their direct manager, reinforced by their consistently exceeding performance expectations, and strive for an equally strong bond with their manager’s manager.

Any regular interaction with managers and executives higher than two levels above their current position is generally avoided. Building trust with the first two higher links in the management chain can accomplish two things:

1. It allows the management chain to run interference for the intrapreneur, which keeps the intrapreneur out of inefficient meetings.
2. It allows the management chain to advocate on behalf of the intrapreneur, which can advance those causes that require resource allocation outside of the business unit.

Why would the links on the plus-2 management chain go to these lengths to advance the cause of an intrapreneur? It comes down, once again, to the core trait of an intrapreneur: productivity. Corporate intrapreneurs have a track record of success. Their previous inventions became products that continue to generate revenue. People like to work with them, and they raise morale. Their management chain wants to keep them happy, and will typically do their best to eliminate corporate obstacles (or raise them to protect the intrapreneur’s time).

By adding plus-2 management to the practice of 3-Box time management, the intrapreneur can make great progress on the delivery of their idea. Eventually they will reach the stage where they are ready to request formal recognition and funding for their idea. This phase is referred to as “Bridge Building”, and will be described in a subsequent post.

image credit: overdriveonline.com

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Steve Todd is Director at EMC Innovation Network, and a high-tech inventor and book author “Innovate With Global Influence“. An EMC Intrapreneur with over 180 patent applications and billions in product revenue, he writes about innovation on his personal blog, the Information Playground. Twitter: @SteveTodd

Accomplishing Your Goals: Insights from Thomas Edison

The State of the Union address often serves as my first mile marker for reviewing the goals I set for the coming year. It’s right about now that the shiny New Year’s resolutions we made on January 1st don’t look so compelling. At best, many of us have lost a big dose of the motivation we felt for our goals in the first place. At worst, our resolutions have evaporated into thin air.

One reason we lag in our ability to successfully realize our goals is that we often express them in ruggedly numeric terms, like: “Eat only 1200 calories per day,” or “Run three times a week.” By doing this we lop off a big part of the internal mechanism the brain uses to keep us on track: our emotions.

Thomas Edison understood this. Best known as a brilliant inventor and innovator who developed technologies that changed the world, he was also a guy who stuck to his goals – despite long odds. Growing up in a lower middle class family didn’t deter Edison from setting goals to become a successful inventor. He wanted to build and run his own laboratory – a place where corporate politics wouldn’t intervene with his futuristic visions. Taunts from the Royal Academy of Science didn’t dissuade Edison from pursuing one of the most technically challenging scientific pursuits of his era: achieving incandescence. After failing in his quest to develop technology for mining and grinding iron ore, Edison instead succeeded in devising the first storage battery made from metals.

What Edison realized was that staying positive – and linking your goals to positive emotions – held the key to successful goal achievement.

Edison’s Goals Harnessed the Natural Wiring of the Brain

In my research on Edison, I identified a unique solution-oriented quality which Edison possessed in spades: aligning goals and passions. By integrating his work with his life purpose, Edison focused on solving juicy problems which held his interest for long periods of time. He was able to tackle problems that others would have abandoned (and did) long before Edison would even consider throwing in the towel.

Some of the factors which led to Edison’s successful goal-creation approach can be explained by neuroscience.

Contemporary psychological research validates Edison’s approach, and supports the notion that we can all learn how to develop this essential element of success. Dr. John Dacey, professor emeritus of developmental psychology at Boston College, and Dr. Kathleen Lennon of Framingham State College studied and then condensed decades of research into what makes scientists, writers, business leaders, musicians, and other powerfully creative individuals successful. Among the most important traits they uncovered are: 1) passionate goal directedness, and 2) perseverance through self-control.

Dacey and Lennon emphasize that both of those qualities can be developed by adults even if they do not possess those traits in younger years, as Edison clearly did. Citing numerous studies by psychologists including Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Paul Torrance, David Perkins, Robert Weber, and others, Dacey and Lennon conclude that passionate goal directedness helps successful individuals generate “great amounts of energy to invest intensely in their work.” These goals are typically long term in nature and associated with a big vision; so the second skill, perseverance rough self-control, is critical in allowing fulfillment of the first. Dacey and Lennon define self-control as an individual’s willingness to “persevere in the face of frustration.’

In other words, success is a function of perseverance, and perseverance is driven by aligning passions with big, long-term goals. Edison’s success was the result of his passionate goal directedness.” His “pulsating desire” allowed him to “transcend everything” so that frustrations, obstacles, and difficulties seemed to provide him even more energy. As a colleague remarked, “Edison seemed pleased when he to run up against serious difficulty. It would seem to stiffen his backbone make him more prolific of new ideas. For a time, I thought it was foolish to imagine such a thing, but I could never get away from the impression that he really appeared happy when he ran up against a serious snag.”

Dr. Richard Restak, a clinical professor of neuroscience at the George Washington University Hospital School of Medical and Health Sciences, offers further validation of Edison’s approach. Restak argues that many goals go unfulfilled or are prematurely abandoned because they are not designed robustly enough to mobilize the brain. He points out that for the brain to remember to organize behavior in alignment with a goal, it must connect the emotional component with its rational component. This alignment links the prefrontal cortex with the limbic system, thereby dramatically enhancing the likelihood that the goal will be remembered and translated into behavior.

Understanding how to set goals so that they will be remembered and translated into behavior is a simple, critical key to successful innovation and, of course, to personal happiness and fulfillment. Yet despite the wealth of information available on the topic, most organizational innovation efforts fail because they don’t define their goals clearly, and they neglect to align goals with emotions. Innovation literacy begins with a practical understanding of how to define and align your personal goals.

The EDISON Goal Creation Formula

Here is a simple formula you can apply to your own successful goal creation. Mapped to the acronym EDISON, it will guide you to those places where your brain holds positive emotions. The EDISON goal creation formula will aid you in harnessing passions to override the strictly objective and quantitative. As well, it will amp up your goals to new levels, ensuring they become bigger and more purpose-oriented than mere tick marks on a spreadsheet. Rework your goal statements to align with these key elements:

E – Emotional: Express your goal in words that energize and excite you. Feel the passion associated with the fulfillment of your goal. Don’t hold back.

D – Decisive: Make a committed decision to give the full force of your own intention to realizing your goal, even if you don’t yet see the path to its realization.

I – Integrated: Link your goal to a higher purpose, such as lifelong health, vibrant creativity, peace in your relationships. This connects the achievement of your goal to the benefit of others besides yourself.

S – Sensory: Use all your senses to vividly imagine the manifestation of your goal. Draw it, speak it, dance it, taste it!

O – Optimistic: Engage the most positive image you can conjure around your goal. Map this positive image into your thoughts so that, like the force of gravity, it just ‘shows up’ all the time easily and without effort.

N – Now: Envision and express your goal in present-time terms. Begin your actions now!

Go back and have a look at your 2012 goals. Reframe them into the EDISON format. Don’t lash yourself if you haven’t made any progress so far this year – give the EDISON method a try! Allow it to jump-start you to action. What worked for Edison can work for you!

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Sarah Miller Caldicott is a great grandniece of Thomas Edison, and author of Innovate Like Edison as well as Inventing the Future. Sarah can be reached at info@powerpatterns.com.

There are a handful of big companies that really understand customer relationships in a deep way.  A couple of them sell this expertise in the form of customer relationship management (CRM) software and related consulting. Wikipedia says:

“CRM is a widely implemented strategy for managing a company’s interactions with customers, clients and sales prospects. It involves using technology to organize, automate, and synchronize business processes—principally sales activities, but also those for marketing, customer service, and technical support. The overall goals are to find, attract, and win new clients, nurture and retain those the company already has, entice former clients back into the fold, and reduce the costs of marketing and client service.”

Education is a relationship enterprise but we’re lacking basic relationship management systems.  Student information systems (SIS) track basic student records.  Sometimes they are connected to a gradebook, but that only includes a handful of marks per semester.  Some learning management systems (LMS) and data systems like SchoolNet turn a little assessment data into dashboards that help monitor achievement.  These companies help schools make the best of limited information.  Almost everyone in education has a data poverty mindset.

“In contrast,” notes startup Junyo, “Popular web sites such as Google, Facebook, and Zynga collect millions of data points for each user throughout the day which are used to improve search results, recommend friends, and make games more fun.The shift to personal digital learning will bring a flood of data.  Most digital content will include embedded assessment and will provide continuous feedback to the learner.  Every assignment will leave a trail of keystrokes that could yield valuable achievement data.  Digital learners will provide 2 million data points each year instead of 200 marks in a gradebook.

It’s time for sophisticated relationship management in education.  It’s time for comprehensive and portable learner profiles that track:

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Tom Vander Ark is CEO of Open Education Solutions and a partner in Learn Capital. He is a former public school superintendent and chairs the International Association for K-12 Online Learning. Author of Getting Smart: How Personal Digital Learning is Changing the World, Tom blogs daily at Getting Smart. Contact him at Tom@GettingSmart.com or follow @tvanderark on Twitter.

By Dwayne Spradlin, CEO of InnoCentive

In our book “The Open Innovation Marketplace: Creating Value in the Challenge Driven Enterprise” published this year by FT Press, Alph Bingham and I explored Open Innovation and the Challenge Driven Enterprise. As we continue our discussion of Challenges and why they are profoundly important in this four part series, we turn our attention now to Challenges as a better way to organize and distribute work.

There are many kinds of work. There’s work on the assembly line, analyzing water for impurities, delivering newspapers, and fighting wars. And loosely speaking, Challenges may have a role to play in all these kinds of activities. And there is a different kind of more intellectual work requiring more creativity and invention, whereby a need is identified and a solution sought. Examples include development of a marketing strategy, a new plastic material for manufacturing, or an innovative approach to engaging customers.

In this latter kind of work, well-defined Challenges represent a powerful tool for organizing human activity and motivating innovative outcomes.

Organizations have spent years defining efficient organizational forms, writing Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), crafting job descriptions, and even developing robust platforms for planning and tracking work. And they are becoming more efficient. Use of contract labor and outsourcing of work, even whole functions, is more commonplace than ever. These approaches have often improved the bottom lines of businesses by increasing flexibility, lowering costs, and enabling projects to be accelerated. However with notable exceptions, these exercises in efficiency and shifting labor costs have done little to fundamentally change the rules of the game—to create anything like a “step change” in business performance and breakthrough innovation. In most instances, the 20th-century approach is essentially institutionalized resource planning and labor arbitrage that is simply commoditizing work and trading high cost labor for lower cost alternatives. It is not creating a unique competitive advantage. And it is certainly not tapping the creative capacity of organizations and the world to innovate. In some cases, it has actually achieved the opposite effect. Consider how many companies arguably lost their innovative edge by focusing so singularly on cost reduction that they lost the very resources and capabilities needed to be competitive over time (for example, Dell, General Motors). Some even created their next generation competition by turning their suppliers and partners into the only true sources of innovation (for example, semiconductors).

Clearly a less simplistic and more intriguing model for remaining both competitive and innovative must exist. If you are to fundamentally transform the economics of businesses, while achieving heightened levels of innovation performance, it is clear that a substantially more scalable approach will be required.

Such an approach would leverage network efficiencies, better economics, and modern technology. Organizations will open up their processes, inviting in thousands or millions of individuals and organizations to participate in their business processes.

Thanks to the Internet, you can now engage a global platform in your problem solving and use this platform to deliver against your goals with precision and consistency, while better leveraging your in-house resources.

But how can you engage this nearly unbounded marketplace of knowledge workers, creative and inventive minds, and productive capacity? You need a robust mechanism of engagement. It must be lightweight. It must be simple. It must be enormously flexible. It must be universally understood. Again, the “Challenge” fills that role, meeting all these requirements. In effect, the Challenge uniquely represents the enabling capability, the universal language, and the rules of engagement in neutral terms in order to empower a truly “open” access to human capital inside and outside the organization. It is magnificent in its simplicity. And in many respects, it has been hiding in plain sight for generations.

What is the inducement to this network of potential problem solvers to answer the call? For a simple idea, a small reward or inducement may be sufficient, whereas a technological innovation may require a team to spend months of time and capital to develop a winning solution, requiring substantial incentives. Internally focused Challenges may reward employees with reputation, points for the company store, or lunch with the CEO. Inducements may be peer recognition or once-in-a-lifetime experiences. (InnoCentive and NASA recently offered a unique viewing of a space shuttle launch.)

All these things must be assembled into a Challenge before it is exposed to the world of problem solvers. This also enables what some call the transition from Not Invented Here (NIH) to Proudly Found Elsewhere (PFE).

In the next and final post in this blog series, we will explore Challenges as a powerful Strategy tool.

Warm regards,

Dwayne Spradlin

Hang in there, Kodak. Bankruptcy doesn’t have to mean the end.

Eastman Kodak (NYSE:EKDKQ) surprised few by declaring bankruptcy last week. It was clear to many business insiders back in September that Kodak was headed to zero after a panicked move to tap its credit line. As those who have watched the corporate history of Kodak know, years of big debts and a lack of innovation have been weighing on the iconic photography company for quite some time.

So is bankruptcy the end of Kodak? Will the brand disappear forever?

Probably not. Chapter 11 is sometimes just another chapter in the long history of a company. Here are several big-name companies that have declared bankruptcy — and emerged successfully on the other side.

Major Airline Carriers

It’s impossible to pick just one airline brand that has declared Chapter 11. Major carriers have gotten bankruptcy filings down to a science in this era of expensive regulations, expensive fuel costs and expensive union contracts. Here’s a short list of the players:

In November of last year, AMR Corp., the parent of American Airlines, was the last of the “legacy carriers” to suffer bankruptcy reorganization. It has yet to emerge, obviously.

Continental Airlines slid in to bankruptcy first, in both 1983 and 1990, before a merger with United to form United Continental Holdings (NYSE:UAL) in 2010. United itself went bankrupt in 2002 and emerged in 2006.

Delta Air Lines (NYSE:DAL) filed for bankruptcy in 2005 and emerged in 2007.

US Airways (NYSE:LCC) went bankrupt in 2002, briefly emerged, and went bust again in 2004. It was married with America West in 2005 to make it healthy enough to muddle through.

Obviously, the airline business has seen a mess of bankruptcies. But the planes keep flying, and the companies keep operating. They may never be growth stocks or big cash cows for investors, but they haven’t disappeared.

General Motors

General Motors (NYSE:GM) was facing troubles before the financial crisis, and in early 2009 relied on a government bailout — as did fellow ailing automaker Chrysler. The total price tag of the automaker bailouts was $82 billion (and according to a recent report, taxpayers will lose about $14 billion on the “investment”).

But GM made a speedy exit from Chapter 11, emerging in July of 2010 and holding a $20 billion GM public offering in November 2010 – the largest IPO in history at the time.

Bankruptcy led to lots of changes at GM, from restructured union contracts to the end of the Pontiac and Saturn brands to the death of Mr. Goodwrench. But now, GM is soundly profitable with around $150 billion in annual revenue. So much for General Motors being junked after bankruptcy.

Sbarro

A mainstay of mall and airport food courts, Sbarro has about 1,000 cafeteria-style pizza and pasta restaurants in the U.S. and overseas. The late Gennaro Sbarro started the business in 1956, and his family sold it to a private equity firm in 2007. The company went under in 2011, however, filing for Chapter 11.

Sbarro’s challenges were apparently shared in the pizza “sector” in 2011. The nation’s No. 10 pizza shop, West-coast based Round Table pizza with over 500 locations, and Uno Chicago Grill also went belly up in the same year.

In November 2011, Sbarro was granted court approval to emerge from bankruptcy after slashing its debt by around 70%, and providing the company to $35 million in cash to grow.

Friendly’s

In October of 2011, Friendly’s announced that it was declaring bankruptcy and closing over 60 stores nationwide. But quick as a wink, the company emerged just a few weeks ago — on Jan. 9 — after selling operations and restructuring. Friendly’s blamed the sluggish economy and slowing consumer spending, but apparently a quick reshaping of the balance sheet and some cost-cutting was enough to change the company’s fortunes.

Friendly’s has a 76-year history of offering tasty desserts and diner food. But it also has gotten a bad rap with many consumers for the quality of its service. Check any online review site like Yelp and look for yourself. New management says it will address these concerns, but only time will tell.

It’s also worth noting, however, that Friendly’s is reliant on the success of its ice cream business far above any gains at its namesake restaurants. At the time of the bankruptcy, old ownership Friendly’s Restaurants Franchise LLC listed estimated assets and liabilities in the range of $10-$50 million, whereas another unit Friendly Ice Cream Corp listed liabilities and assets of $100-$500 million.

It’s no surprise then that Friendly’s has made retail sales of its branded products a priority now that it’s out from under Chapter 11.

Eddie Bauer

In the 1990s, you’d be hard pressed to find a more American brand than Eddie Bauer. It provided stylish and rugged outdoorwear in the vein of LL Bean, and even got the Bauer brand on the most iconic SUV of the era — the Ford Explorer. But just several years later, Eddie Bauer was out of style, and consumers were trading in four-wheel-drive gas-guzzlers for hybrids. Its parent company, Spiegel Catalog, sought bankruptcy protection in 2003.

After emerging in 2005, however, Eddie Bauer filed for Chapter 11 again in 2009. It was acquired at auction by Golden Gate Capital later that year.

Though not quite the pinnacle of style and outdoorsy toughness it once was, Eddie Bauer remains a respected apparel brand and a regular tenant at shopping centers and outlet malls. It employs some 10,000 people worldwide — and in case you’re curious, it’s running one heck of a 60%-off sale right now.

imagecredit:newcissa

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Jeff Reeves is editor of InvestorPlace.com, where this article first appeared and a regular contributor to the Huffington Post. Write him at jreeves@investorplace.com. Follow Jeff Reeves on Twitter: www.twitter.com/JeffReevesIP

With apologies to Burt Bacharach for liberating his song title, I want to develop the concept of the innovator as a cold hearted killer, a love 'em and leave 'm type more suited as the villain in a dime store novel more than the passionate, heroic leading man. Because people who fall in love with ideas, or products, often don't have the strength to do what they must.  Create a new idea or new product that makes the old one obsolete. Anyone who has worked as an innovator knows the risk.  It's easy to fall in love with an idea.  So many ideas are so perfect, so suited for the need or opportunity.  But falling in love with an idea is dangerous.  Falling in love with an idea means as an innovator you are too close to your ideas to evaluate them effectively, and will miss problems or conflicts in the idea.  A good innovator must be as willing to rework ideas and yes, even kill ideas as he or she is to promote an idea.  A detached aloofness is probably your best bet, emotion wise. Falling in love with an idea, however, is an easily forgivable sin, while falling in love with an existing product or service is what stymies innovation and creates lethargy.  Far too many organizations have far too many executives in love with ideas that, like fading soap opera actresses have starred in their roles for far too long.  Falling in love with existing products or services isn't just dangerous, it's deadly. Look no further than Kodak for example.  Kodak continued to stick with the fading actress of film, all the while courting the emerging actress digital, but never made the clean break.  Too many people were entranced by film.  Too many people were reliant on the business models, revenues and programs that film created.  In the end, Kodak was wedded to a corpse, while a patient new bride waited to take its place.  Now, that bride may find itself in the arms of another. Innovators and executives need to be ruthless.  In a training program today I asked the class "Who should force your own products into obsolescence?"  There are only two possible answers - yourself or everyone else.  If you fall in love with ideas or products, and ignore the signals of the market, you will suffer the same outcome as Kodak.  If your innovation efforts can be as ruthless as JR Ewing, as cold hearted as Gordon Gecko and as decisive as Churchill, then your innovation efforts will not be in vain.  If, on the other hand, you engage in a love affair with your ideas or your existing products, obsolescence will be your only friend. Love the innovation process, love the creation of new ideas, love the exploration of customer needs.  Act with reserve in the evaluation of ideas and be absolutely ruthless when considering the further life of existing products.  Because that's how the firms seeking to disrupt your products will look at them.

As poet Robert Burns put it: “The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men/ Gang aft agley.” Experienced leaders know how just easily the most carefully crafted plan can go awry, particularly in the innovation process.

In his new Little Black Book of Innovation, Scott Anthony cautions against betting the farm on the perfect plan. “No business plan survives first contact with the market,” Anthony says. “Innovators should start by assuming their plans are partly right and partly wrong. The plan itself doesn’t separate the winners from the losers. The reaction to adversity, the way in which you pivot…is what separates the winners from the losers.” To support his case, he quotes everyone from military strategists to boxer Mike Tyson, who said: “Everybody has a plan, until they get punched in the face.”

As a project progresses, innovators must remain open to the need to adjust course. “Truth be told, ideas are most likely to reveal their flaws immediately prior to completion,” says Scott Belsky in Making Ideas Happen. “It is for this reason that proponents of entrepreneurship argue that the primary reason small start-up companies have an advantage over large corporations is their flexibility and ability to make changes at the last minute.” While the end goal should be clear – for example, solving a customer’s particular problem – it’s likely many roads can lead you there.

Adds innovation blogger Mitch Ditkoff: “True innovation is about allowing room enough for paradox to be a teacher and guide – and to accept, at least for a little longer than usual, ambiguity, dissonance, and discomfort – the age-old precursors to breakthrough.”

image credit: wastetimepost.com; summertimeinipanema.com

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A former journalist and strategic communication specialist, Josie Gibson set up a CFO network, among other things, and now works with companies on creativity and innovation initiatives.  www.pourquoi.com.au

My last few blog posts have detailed some of the common challenges around social product innovation and the steps companies can take to overcome them. With today’s post, I want to take a brief break from discussing challenges and talk about some predictions for social product innovation in 2012.

Challenge Driven Innovation (CDI) is an innovation framework that accelerates traditional innovation outcomes by leveraging open innovation and crowd sourcing along with defined methodology, process, and tools to help organizations develop and implement actionable solutions to their key problems, opportunities, and challenges. We asked Dr. Frank Ermark, working with innovation portfolio management at Nokia Mobile Phones about his point of view on CDI.

If you think the copyright wars over SOPA and PIPA that resulted in the Wikipedia Blackout were contentious, wait until you see what happens when the debate over copyright is extended beyond music, film, video games and books and into the realm of physical objects like sneakers and toys. The ... Read More

How often have you heard someone say something like “No need to reinvent the wheel”?

It’s such a common phrase we don’t even think twice when we hear it. The thing is, a lot of the time there is a huge need to reinvent the wheel.

If we didn’t reinvent the wheel on a regular basis, we’d be driving using cars, bicycles, wheelchairs, shopping trolleys, vacuum cleaners, and an almost infinite number of other things using wheels that look like this:

That wouldn’t be so good.

If we never reinvented the wheel, we wouldn’t have things like the Osmos Orbital Wheel:

In addition to looking really cool, the Orbital Wheel has significant advantages over regular wheels in performance, reliability and safety.

Clearly there are good reasons to reinvent the wheel. How do we know when to do so? Here are some guidelines for wheel reinvention:

• Innovate in Your Core: you don’t need to be good at everything. In response to this statement “Leading practice companies need to follow leading practice for water management,” one of our research partners once said:

  I disagree with that. Leading practice companies can’t be leading practice in everything. They need to be leading practice in the things that are critical for them, but for everything else they just need to be fit-for-purpose. For example, I don’t want to be leading practice in payroll – there are other people that I can outsource that to – we just need to be fit-for-purpose.

  It’s probably smart to avoid reinventing the wheel in the parts of your operation that just need to be fit-for-purpose. However, in the operational activities that are critical, it can be highly profitable to reinvent the wheel. This is where new business models often originate.

• Explore related areas: a lot of fruitful wheel reinvention has come from looking at how the wheel might be applied in related areas. That is how we ended up using wheels in all of their various applications. This is what Steven Johnson talked about as “exploring the adjacent possible” in Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation.

  Saul Kaplan has expanded this idea very well in a number of posts. Here he discusses how to create space for wheel reinvention:

  The trick is to explore and test new models while at the same time continuing to live within current ones. This requires establishing adjacent innovation platforms with the freedom to explore new ways to create and deliver value, especially approaches that are disruptive to the current model. Adjacent innovation platforms must have the freedom to experiment with different rules and financial models. Connected adjacencies require senior leadership sponsorship, support, and protection or they will fail. They must be free to recombine and connect capabilities in new ways unconstrained by the existing organization. Those working in the adjacencies must be empowered to borrow and flexibly deploy capabilities and technologies from inside and outside the organization in novel ways.

• Find areas of poor performance and innovate there: if you look at where the Osmos Orbital Wheel is being used, it is showing up primarily in racing applications. This is where its performance advantages show up the most. A lot of important wheel reinvention happens at the extremes – when we are trying to meet the needs of the most advanced (or the most reluctant) users.

I’m pretty happy that I’m not using crude wooden wheels everywhere these days. Reinventing the wheel is how we move forward. In many cases, the biggest innovations are not completely new ideas, but rather something that already exists being repurposed. That’s what reinventing the wheel is all about.

So by all means, please reinvent the wheel.