Building your innovation toolkit: why Phil McKinney is awesome

Phil McKinney (philmckinney.com, @philmckinney) is the former CTO of HP (now retired), author,  innovation coach and mentor to many.

I have followed Phil’s Killer Innovations podcast and his blog for a number of years and continue to be impressed by how selflessly he shares a successful career’s worth of knowledge and tools. Phil has always said that early in his career, he was taken in and mentored by a successful executive and that this mentor had a profound effect ion both his career and his life. Phil’s contributions are his way of “paying it forward” and helping the next generation of innovators.

I have listened to almost all of the podcasts but keep coming back to podcast 27: Ranking Your Ideas. When brainstorming or sorting through your ideas book, it can be tough to decide what you should actually work on. Using a series of questions, Phil will help you sort through the pile to find the standouts.

I have mentioned Phil before, but I wanted to expand a bit on why his information is so valuable for your innovation toolkit.

If you are interested in more info on building your innovation toolkit, check out my post here.

Nokia uses crowdsourcing to design the ultimate phone

Looks like I am a bit late to the party, but Nokia is using the knowledge of the crowd to design a new concept phone. Based on user input on the Nokia Conversations site the handset maker will put together a concept that will have the correct mix of style, features and cost, based on customer input. Crowdsourcing is not a new concept but it has shown success in the past at solving tough challenges for a fraction of the cost of internally designed solutions.

So head over to the sight, spend a minute and give Nokia your input on the perfect phone.

Putting customers before shareholders

Today’s post asks whether an organization’s long term financial health is best served when the organization’s main focus is to increase share price each and every quarter, or if more value is generated by putting the customer their needs first.

Recent literature on the subject implies that the popular trend of the last three decades may not be the best choice – prioritizing share price above all else may actually rob longterm shareholders of wealth that could have been generated with a customer first policy. In the January-February 2010 issue of the Harvard Business Review, Roger Martin (dean of the Rotman School of Management) took a close look at a few companies that put the customer first. Interestingly, many of these companies generated strong shareholder returns compared to the S&P 500 while creating customer loyalty (or because of it).

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Build your disruptive innovation toolkit

Disruptive innovation changes everything. Incumbents are toppled and upstarts are victorious simply because they turn everything on its head. Business models, markets even customers are re-defined in a disruptive innovation. Organizations that can disrupt successfully can carve entirely new markets and enjoy immense success. Organizations that can disrupt consistently will achieve rock star status in no time.

So what exactly does it take to disrupt? How can you come up with the next big idea? John Sviokla posted on his blog at Harvard business publishing about four things you should have in your disruptive innovation toolkit. Here is my spin on those four concepts: Simplification, there is nothing cheaper then free, take advantage of new technologies to drastically reduce cost and build a small team of phenomenal people.

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Why Great Innovators Spend Less Than Good Ones

I’m a bit behind on my blog reading these days so I just came across a great piece written by Scott Anthony of Innosight Ventures about 2 weeks ago. Scott talks about the fact that cash-strapped innovation enterprises often achieve more success than their wealthy counterparts because large commitments “lead people to chase the known rather than the unknown, lead people to frame problems in technological terms and they lead innovators to shut off emergent signals”. Read the whole thing here.

This is a quick post. For more info on quick posts, look here.

Innovation in uncertain times

The past four weeks have been extremely busy. Thankfully, I have had the time to squeeze in a number of interesting lectures and talks. Over the next few posts I am going to cover some talks I attended covering topics such as innovation, systems science, design and design thinking and on creating a smarter planet.

I have mentioned before that in an uncertain economy, innovation becomes more important than ever before. Scott Anthony of Innosight Ventures and author of “The Silver Lining: An Innovation Playbook for Uncertain Times” recently gave a talk at University of Toronto’s Rotman school of business covering innovation and its increasing necessity.

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Killer Innovations Podcast

Phil McKinney’s blog and podcast can be found at www.killerinnovations.com. Phil shares a career’s worth of tips and tricks to innovation and bringing products to market. I listen to the podcasts and find them to be insightful, informative and very easy to listen to. Phil breaks the shows up into segments so you can skip to what you’re looking for if you are in a hurry. I really recommend checking this out and I doubt you will be disappointed if you are looking for ways to come up with new innovations, or looking for help bringing your idea to market.

This is a quick post. For more info on quick posts, look here.

Open source and the 10x advantage

Michael Tiemann of opensource.org blog recently covered the London Stock Exchange’s acquisition of MilleniumIT. MilleniumIT is a medium-sized development firm from Sri Lanka, that utilizes open source technologies. MillenniumIT’s CEO Tony Weeresinghe recently told the press “This transaction with London Stock Exchange Group is a tribute to the innovative culture of our company, the quality of our technology solutions and our deep pool of talented staff.” Read Tiemann’s post here.

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Open innovation literature update

Joel West of openinnovation.net has posted an article about the evolution of open innovation theory over the past three years. He links to articles in a recent issue of R&D Management covering the topic. You can check out his post here.

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Innovation centres

Innovating is an important factor in growing your business, even more so in the midst of an economic downturn. The problem with innovation is that it is hard to consistently generate new innovations that can brought to market. Innovation often occurs sporadically and in small pockets in different areas around the organization. In order to create meaningful innovations on a regular basis, a culture of innovation must be adopted within the organization and a centralized innovation centre can be helpful in fostering such a culture.

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