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CHAPTER 6
Filling the Idea Funnel

If you can’t schedule creativity, what can you do to ensure a steady stream of good ideas coming into your funnel? What are leading-edge companies doing to ensure this? These are the issues I’ll cover in this chapter. It turns out that there’s a lot you can do, and a lot you don’t want to try doing, based on the experiences of the Vanguard firms.

While breakthrough ideas can never be hatched on demand, you can create the conditions where an abundance of promising new products, services, process improvements, and strategic initiatives are coming to your attention—and then it’s your responsibility to select the most promising and move them on through the development pipeline. But because so many firms generate ideas haphazardly, just putting an ongoing process in place to keep filling the funnel puts you out ahead. This is no doubt why the Innovation 118Vanguard firms continuously refine and tweak, and sometimes completely rethink and reinvent the way they go about generating ideas.

• Google holds group brainstorming sessions eight times a year involving 100 engineers in each session.
• WiltonArmetale, a manufacturer of houseware items such as pewter wine coasters, holds three offsite sessions a year to examine lifestyle trends and dream up new products. The five-person management team remains the same, but they utilize a new ideation tool each time to “keep the creative juices flowing.”
• IBM regularly conducts global, internet-based InnovationJams where over a five-week period they solicit breakthrough ideas from employees, partner organizations such as their reseller network, and even family members.

Why go to all this trouble?

Simply put, if good ideas don’t get hatched, they surely aren’t going to get launched down the line. Leaving it to chance is not an option. Being proactive is essential. What I recommend to clients is simply said but not easy to maintain: Put regular brainstorming or “ideation” sessions, as they are called, on your corporate calendar! Such scheduled sessions, which can include differing groups of associates and managers, ensure that attention gets paid to the front end of innovation. No matter how busy everyone is, no matter how much is going on, idea generation is on the calendar.

Reinventing Ideation

Ideation is the purposeful process of coming up with ideas using state-of-the-art techniques. Ideation is the magnification of your thinking patterns. Ideation is the act of thinking big on purpose; it is about stimulating new thinking. Ideation is possibility thinking with a purpose. Ideation is disruptive in intent: you are trying to dislodge the logic of the status quo, “the way we do things around here,” “the way we serve customers,” etc., in order to give birth to new possibilities, new opportunities—new growth vehicles.

Ideation sessions are different from regular meetings, where there is often immediate discussion when somebody proposes an idea. In ideation sessions, a facilitator sets forth ground rules, one of which is that analyzing an 119idea during the generation session is strictly prohibited. The best ideation sessions are the result of careful planning and have well-defined criteria. The best facilitators are experienced in a variety of techniques and are very dynamic. When my consulting group was invited to help the Got Milk? organization in Washington, DC put together an ideation session, we started five months in advance, identified a cross-section of invitees representing all aspects of the industry, carefully selected a site for the meeting (an award-winning conference facility nestled in a wooded area outside Chicago), and branded the event as the “Got Ideas?” session. We made sure each participant did some homework on our topic which was “how do we stimulate milk consumption” and disrupt the inroads made by sodas, juice drinks, etc. One executive bought pizza and invited people from his dairy company to spend their lunch hour brainstorming with him.

While ideation techniques are hardly in short supply these days, what they all have in common is that they try to get you to come up with a lot of ideas. The old saying that if you want a good idea, you’ll need to hatch lots of them still applies. As someone who often leads ideation sessions, my unscientific research shows that out of a productive session of organized brain-storming, you will probably generate hundreds of ideas. Later, when you start idea selection, you’ll soon begin to whittle the number of usable ideas down fairly quickly. My colleagues and I have found that it takes 80 to 100 ideas to produce on average the one idea you want to seriously consider.

While research that proves this phenomenon is difficult to come by, anecdotal evidence is everywhere.

The toy design unit of IDEO, the product design firm in Palo Alto, California, keeps careful track of the ideas this ten-person unit comes up with because ideas themselves are its “product.” Skyline, as the unit is called, sells or licenses ideas for toys that are made and marketed by established toy companies such as Mattel and Fisher-Price. In a typical year, the unit will generate some 4,000 concepts for new toys. Of these, 230 were considered promising enough to be pursued to prototype, and of the 230, 12 concepts were actually sold. Brendan Boyle, founder and head of Skyline, told Stanford professor and innovation expert Robert I. Sutton that the success rate was probably even worse than it looked because some toys that are bought never make it to market, and of those that do, only a small percentage reap large sales and profits. As Boyle told Sutton: “You can’t get any good new ideas without having a lot of dumb, lousy, and crazy ones. Nobody in

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my business is very good at guessing which are a waste of time and which will be the next Furby.”

Ideation Strategy 1: Activate your own idea factory first.

What gets your creative juices flowing? Before we begin looking at ideation methods you can use in your company, I invite you to consider your own habits for generating ideas. Like an organization, you have certain engrained processes that you use when you need to solve problems and conceptualize opportunities. In my seminars, I often give attention to the things in our busy lives that distract us from creative thinking. In what New York Times columnist and bestselling author Thomas Friedman calls the “flat world,” creativity and the ability to produce your share of novel solutions, is highly prized. It’s easier to delegate the tasks that require the skills associated with optimization, replication, and exploitation and it’s easier to find people who can perform these tasks adequately.

One flat-world skill is exploration, in contrast to exploitation. Exploration of new business models, exploration of customer “pain points.” exploration of new markets you might enter. The skills of exploration are highly prized in organizations today precisely because they are rare. If you’re in charge of leading your organization into a different future, start the journey by assessing your own beliefs about the explorer/creator in you.

Would you say that you’re not creative? Many of the managers I work with each year hold this belief. They assume that creativity is something others have, but not them. I remind them that there are different types of creativity, that people are often more creative than they think. I remind them that the people who report to them, even the ones they would identify as “not creative,” may have hobbies and interests outside of work in which they 121are incredibly resourceful, knowledgeable, and creative. Often, I find that it’s the way they approach coming up with ideas that needs to be consciously reexamined. For example, do you try to come up with important ideas while sitting at your desk? Do you try to get thinking done while answering 200 emails a day, while rushing from one meeting to the next? In the flat world, it’s the executive and managerial class who are running flat out.

• 31 percent of USA college-educated male workers are regularly logging 50 or more hours a week at work, up from 22 percent in 1980. In Europe, the number of French and German executives working longer hours is on the increase as well.
• Fully 25 percent of executives at large companies around the world say their communications—voice, email, meetings—are nearly or completely unmanageable, according to a McKinsey survey of more than 7,800 managers.
• About 40 percent of American adults get less than seven hours of sleep on weekdays, up from 34 percent in 2001.

You might think that with all the long hours, executives would be anxious to delegate, disconnect, and disappear in order to regenerate. But the growing trend is toward always being connected every hour of the day and night, turning weekends and vacations into an extension of the regular grind, and blurring the lines between work and leisure. If I see another television commercial where mom or dad are busily typing on their computer while little children are curled up beside them I’ll yell, “You’re multitasking in the worst sort of way and not doing justice to either activity!” Your kid needs 100 percent of your attention, needs the eye contact, needs the soul connection, needs quality and quantity time with you and there’s no substitute.

With a steady barrage of messages coming at us, we are susceptible to a state of mind that Babson College’s Tom Davenport calls “continuous partial attention.” We react and frantically, frenetically reply to whatever questions are being posed by the sender, whatever breaking news comes at us. But unless we unplug, we never really pause to think about what it all means, to connect the dots in some unexpected way.

If you’ve heard me speak, you’ve probably heard me recommend that if you want to do important thinking, then shift. Shift the environment to one that brings beauty to your eyes, peace to your soul, and energizes you.

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People often tell me they get their best ideas in the shower, to which I query how they manage to capture those ideas? A close second in terms of popularity, are people who say they get most of their ideas driving in their car. Then I tell them the story of Doug Greene, CEO and founder of New Hope Communications, of Boulder, Colorado who gave me the idea that if you really want to get serious about personal ideation, take a Doug Day.

When I asked Doug where he got most of his ideas, he credited the discipline of taking a full day each month to go offline, to leave meetings and “continuous partial attention” for an appointment with himself. Here’s how Greene described his process:

Activating your personal idea factory will become more and more important in the years ahead. You will be better able to inspire others to nurture ideas if you are “in touch” with your own, and if you’re constantly tweaking your personal process. One thing for sure: Each of us is unique and different and nowhere is this more apparent than when it comes to generating ideas. Yet differences aside, what we all have in common is the fact that we are most creative when we are emotionally committed, when we are passionate about the project or the problem at hand, and are turned on by the work we do. My clients will often smile and laugh as I tell them they should take a Brenda Day, or a Prakash Day, or a Steve Day, but they’ll then proceed to tell me how they just don’t have time. My response? You don’t have time not to!

Ideation Strategy 2: Benchmark and learn new ideation methods.

If I’ve convinced you that organizing regular ideation sessions to keep your funnel filled is an absolute must, now it’s time for me to try to convince you 123that when you do one of these sessions you don’t want to leave it to chance that it is a success. Unless you want to drop everything and spend the time to attend conferences and read books to learn the latest methods, you will benefit from inviting an ideation specialist to help you out. Without an outsider to help you organize and facilitate, you’re prone to lapsing back into old habits. Ideation specialists can teach you their techniques in the process of fulfilling their assignment.

One habit that will be hardest to break is the human tendency to want to analyze and discuss the merits of an idea when you’re supposed to be brain-storming lots of ideas. The smarter the group, the more Ph.D.s I’m working with, the more senior executives in the room, the more I know I’ll have to police this—and the more drill sergeant I have to be to keep people on track.

Even after setting the ground rules, painstakingly assigning everyone to diverse teams, and imploring them to generate as many raw ideas as possible, I’ll overhear a comment like “we already tried that and it didn’t work.” Most meetings are dominated by such people, and which ideas get considered? The ones from the most senior person in the room. Here are seven rules I remind people about at the outset of every ideation session.

1. Don’t allow judgment. Appoint someone on each team.
2. Limit the size of brainstorming teams to no more than six. Too many people and it gets too confusing. Too few and you may not be able to spark each other’s thinking.
3. Build on the ideas of others. Encourage this, as it’s far more productive than getting 150 unconnected ideas.
4. One person at a time. Take turns, so that the soft-spoken but brilliant mumbler with the thick accent gets as much air time as everyone else.
5. Go for quantity. Shoot for 150 ideas in 30 to 45 minutes.
6. Encourage wild and crazy ideas. To paraphrase Einstein, “If at first an idea doesn’t sound absurd, then there’s no hope for it.”
7. Make sure everyone’s ideas get captured and displayed.

One of the leading ideation experts is Doug Hall, a former product manager at Procter & Gamble, who runs sessions at Cincinnati, Ohio-based Eureka! Ranch. Hall promises clients 30 commercially viable ideas in three 124days. Hall gave Inc.’s John Grossmann access to an ideation session designed to invent new products for Celestial Seasonings, a $75 million per year company with the lion’s share of a flat market: herbal teas. Celestial wanted to double sales in the next few years, knew it must branch out beyond its present product line, and realized that every business’s vitality is built on being newer and better.

Hall has, like most ideation specialists, a replicable, quantifiable process for getting brains pumping. Hall’s involves a combination of “play, sensory overload, and [later] analytical rigor.”

Hall finds that a major onslaught of stimuli in a fun environment is key to opening people up to new possibilities. Participants brainstorm in an oversized playroom, complete with video games, Nerf bats, toys, and loud music from the ranch jukebox. “Stimulus is the fuel that feeds business-growth thinking—or any kind of thinking, for that matter,” says Hall. Stimuli include visual aids, sounds, scents, data, and experiences. Using external stimuli is more effective than using traditional “brain-draining,” he finds, because the stimulated brain is eager to “associate, connect, and piece together the stimuli into relevant, yet unexpected, ideas.”

The goal is to generate as many new products and positioning ideas as possible. “No idea is too radical,” he tells the group, admonishing them to “respect the newborns… tomorrow we’ll strangle them.” Why does he do it this way? Grossman asks. For a simple reason, says Hall. “I get better ideas. Breakthroughs are going to contradict history, so you have to break rules.” Ultimately, it’s about getting people off autopilot, challenging assumptions whether personal, group, company, or industry. “You’ve got to shatter the systems and find new paths if you want an innovative organization,” he says.

Hall is assisted in his intensive sessions by a group of “Trained Brains,” friends and associates of Hall’s who are not formally trained and don’t come from the same industry as the participants, therefore don’t have the same background and assumptions. Their value is the varied backgrounds and experiences they bring to the event. They tend to be entrepreneurial types who can “both dream and package their dreams into reality, and they have the ability to provoke and stimulate.”

Hall’s unorthodox tactics include the “Mind Dumpster,” in which the first flushing of ideas is written down: new product categories, target audiences, interesting words. The point is to pluck the low-hanging fruit, which 125is rarely the sweetest. Removing those first-blush ideas frees the mind for bigger, better, more daring concepts on harder to reach branches. During brainstorming, every idea is written down regardless of how outrageous it seems. From this method 1,500 to 2,000 ideas are typically generated. One of Hall’s basic tenets is that a high number of raw ideas leads to a high number of what he calls “wicked good” ideas.

Summing up the intense three-day workshop, Hall analogizes his role to that of a football coach calling plays. “First I’ll stretch their thinking from a product standpoint, focusing on occasion and target audience. Then I might hit them with the picture boards, where I focus on getting them to deal with emotions and phrases and language. Now I’m getting to the marketing side. It’s setting up both the running game and the passing game. We really push people here. What often happens is, late in the day, when they think they’ve thought of everything, all of a sudden out pops another idea.”

Innovation-adept firms invest in experiencing cutting-edge ideation sessions like those held at Eureka! Ranch. They read books, attend seminars, and constantly seek to improve their skills in this area. At DuPont, for example, a special internal consulting unit contracts with the various business units on an as-needed basis to lead ideation sessions. “We’ve learned from the best,” says Robin Karol, a manager at DuPont’s Innovation Process Group. “Our process is more DuPont-like, more sedate [than some of the wackier ideation consultants the team benchmarked] but systematic. We use various methods to take people out of the box, including materials, pictures, and different methods of thinking. We use different methods depending on what country we’re working in, and we are starting to do some of these sessions on the web.”

Ideation Strategy 3: Invite Everyone’s Participation

In Chapter 4, “Fortifying the Idea Factory,” I reported that the consensus among Innovation Vanguard firms was that suggestion systems that ask employees for their ideas are passé. Why? Because they limit the type of ideas asked for and reward only process ideas that save the company money. But then along comes a Vanguard firm with an ideation system that borrows from the suggestion system model to invigorate its quest for ideas.

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Ideation at Bristol-Myers Squibb

Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS) is a New York City-based $21 billion global pharmaceutical firm. While you might think all the ideational action in such a company would be around finding the next breakthrough drug, BMS sees the need for ideas much more broadly.

Marsha MacArthur, grandniece of the late World War II American general Douglas MacArthur, has what is arguably the most unusual job at any drug company in the world: idea searcher. MacArthur works full time designing ideation campaigns for internal customers in the pharmaceutical division. Got a vexing problem? See Marsha, and she’ll come to the rescue.

The idea of having these targeted idea-catalyst campaigns originated with her boss, Mark Wright, vice president of U.S. market research and business intelligence. MacArthur gets calls from “sponsors,” usually project managers looking for new approaches to the business issues they face, which can range widely. When the patent on the firm’s breakthrough drug, Glucophage, was about to expire, the team, with MacArthur’s assistance, launched a campaign to solicit ideas internally on how to get more people to use the drug in the interim.

At lunchtime, to publicize the campaign, employees walked around wearing sandwich boards declaring, “we’re waging war on diabetes and we need your help” and asking for ideas. Town hall meetings were held in which the team’s problem was outlined in greater detail. How do we drive patients into doctors’ offices? How do we get patients to convert from the diabetes drug they are now using to try ours? Employees were directed to submit any ideas they had on how to rev up sales of Glucophage to BMS’s intranet site, where tips on submitting their ideas could be found. One suggestion was to run a national campaign and declare war on diabetes. Another was for a museum for diabetics.

“I was really proud of everybody and the ideas that were submitted. There weren’t obvious ones like, ‘talk to doctors,’ hey we already do that. They were quite well thought out.” In all, that particular campaign generated 4,000 inquiries, and 429 employees thought enough of their ideas to type them up and submit them, a seven-percent submission rate.

Employees based as far away as Poland submitted ideas to the division’s headquarters in Plainsboro, New Jersey. A specially formed team of evaluators 127sifted through all the ideas, selected the top 40, and eventually launched the Be Aggressive Campaign. All submitters received letters thanking them, and certificates and prizes were awarded in some cases. In a typical year, Marsha will conduct 20 to 30 campaigns for sponsors who approach her; some will be in her division, others will be enterprise-wide. With each campaign, she carefully targets, using sophisticated idea management software, different sectors of the employee base, so as not to overwhelm people.

How to Involve Everyone

A big part of making ideation an enterprise-wide responsibility involves making sure the voice of the customer pervades every part of your organization, not just certain departments like sales, marketing, or service. Bring customers into your firm and into your process at every opportunity. Provide the means for your people to get out in the field or on the telephones listening to everyday customers and observeing everyday service interactions.

In recent years, some companies have taken steps to enlarge the number of employees involved in new product/service ideation. Unless participants are involved in listening to customers, you may be wasting your time. Don’t allow any manager, technical specialist, or purchasing, finance, or human resource professional to participate in product, service, or market development decisions unless they’re spending at least 20 percent of their time with current or prospective customers and suppliers.

Invite Everyone to Participate in the Quest for Ideas

Jeff Immelt, CEO of General Electric, spends four or five days a month with customers. Twice a month, he hosts what GE calls town hall meetings with several hundred customers at a time to share ideas on GE’s direction, and to listen to their thoughts on what the company can do better. GE is also doing what it calls Dreaming Sessions with key customer groups, as Immelt says, “trying to think about where our business and their business will be in five or ten years.” Immelt’s favorite question: “If you had $400 million to spend on research and development at GE, how would you prioritize it?”

Vanguard companies like GE know where good ideas come from, and they certainly don’t all come from R&D. In their study of 252 new products at 123 firms, researchers Kleinschmidt and Cooper reported that new products are most often initiated by ideas from customers, rather than from in-house brainstorming sessions or developed internally by research and 128development. When a group of IBM surveyors asked 765 global CEOs where they got new ideas, internal R&D was conspicuously buried much further down the list—only 17 percent of CEOs mentioned it. “This middle-of-the-pack ranking,” IBM concluded, “is just one more indication that CEOs have expanded their innovation focus beyond products and services.”

Involving customers in your company’s ideation process can be accomplished in a number of ways. You can form an advisory board of key customers to serve as a sounding board. You can identify those who show a pattern of purchasing new versions of your products first. While their ideas must be validated with probes of the overall market, these “lead adopters” can provide you with advanced insights into where the market is headed and how you might best respond.

Most customer-driven ideation methods are rooted in traditional market-research techniques ranging from focus groups to quantitative and qualitative surveys. Such methods help uncover unexploited opportunities and dissatisfaction with current offerings that could allow competitor inroads. The limitation of such methods in most industries has to do with the fact that your competitors are asking the same people these same questions. The result is little in the way of creativity, and simply more of the same. But Innovation Vanguard companies are doing things differently.

BMW’s Dialogue with Customers

Munich-based BMW is constantly seeking to discover new technologies and design features to put into future cars. Its interest is not limited to internal research groups, or even to the insights gleaned by listening posts in Palo Alto, California, Tokyo, Japan, and other places. It also extends an invitation to ideate to “creative minds outside the BMW Group.” To harvest their insights, the firm’s Virtual Innovation Agency (VIA, for short) is the point of contact for all external innovators who do not as yet have contacts within the firm. VIA makes it easy for car buffs to communicate their ideas through its website, with additional online discussions that solicit ideas from fans around the world. Within the first week after VIA was launched in July 2001, 4,000 ideas had been received. “VIA is a highly sophisticated idea submission process that allows anyone with access to the Internet to submit ideas and to have those ideas protected. The suggester is prompted through a process that allows him or her to know what the company is and is not interested in hearing about and to get feedback on whether the idea 129has potential. If it does, the idea is routed to the appropriate field group for follow-up.

Involve customers in new ways.

Industries and companies evolve and embrace new methods at different rates. Nowhere is this more evident than in their ways of listening to customers. Methods that are passé to one industry may be state-of-the-art to another. Surveying customers might be old hat in many industries, but for home-builders, it’s relatively new. Conducting focus groups is an ancient practice at consumer products companies, but it’s relatively new within professional service firms. Accepted practices in listening to customers evolve differently in different industries. Who then, might be at the leading edge? Automakers. Faced with ferocious global competition and the need to wager billions of dollars for a new line, auto manufacturers are often the “early adopters” of new ideational techniques.

Using Archetype Research at DaimlerChrysler

Automakers are currently employing ethnography, a branch of anthropology that deals with understanding native cultures. DaimlerChrysler’s PT Cruiser was the first vehicle designed using an ideation process known as “archetype research.” Chrysler has shifted much of its market-research program over to the method, which was introduced to the firm by French-born medical anthropologist G. Clotaire Rapaille. Working with autistic children may seem far afield from the business of trying to divine what fickle car-buyers will want next, but Rapaille’s approach borrows heavily from his training there.

PT Cruiser’s development team sought to create a vehicle that mixed retro and futuristic elements to attract a cult following similar to Volkswagen’s revamped Beetle or the original Mustang. With Rapaille calling the shots, the design team took an early prototype and hit the road to get customer input at sessions in Europe, South America, Asia, and the United States.

In traditional focus groups, participants are chosen because they fit a particular demographic profile: young men, 18 to 24, say. But participants for these sessions were picked to represent an entire country’s culture. Rapaille opened the three-hour sessions by telling participants, seated in a circle near a life-sized PT Cruiser prototype, “I’m from another planet, and I don’t even know what you do with that. What’s the purpose of this thing?”

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Participants were given pens and paper and asked to write stories triggered by the prototype.

During the second hour, people were asked to use scissors and a pile of magazines to cut out words and pictures to help them describe their feelings about the prototype they were looking at. During the third hour, visitors were asked to lie on the floor, with the lights dimmed, and soothing music filling the room. The group was told to relax, and they were invited to let their minds drift back to childhood and recall those memories invoked by the prototype.

After each session, the team poured over the stories with yellow highlight markers, sleuthing for the emotion sparked by the vehicle, or what Rapaille calls “the reptilian hot buttons.” The insights from this highly unusual approach were nothing short of astonishing. Participants contrasted a dangerous outside world with desire for a secure interior and ultrasafe vehicle. “It’s a jungle out there,” was a strong theme. At one session, participants revealed that the prototype on display looked insubstantial and unsafe. In another, participants described the vehicle as too “toy-like.” The prototype’s large rear window, attendees suggested, allowed “prying outsiders” to see in. Participants felt the car would be especially dangerous if hit from behind. The overarching message: “Give me a big thing like a tank.”

In response, PT Cruiser’s fenders were enlarged and given more bulbous curves to give owners a greater feeling of prowess. The rear window was made smaller than designers originally conceived. And after sessions indicated that the initial design “wasn’t creative enough,” designers came up with a rakish forward-sloping roof that had the additional benefit of creating additional interior space.

PT Cruiser became an immediate breakthrough product for the firm, and Chrysler has since expanded the use of this unconventional ideation method. Is ethnography the wave of the future or just another fad? Time will tell, but one thing is clear. In the past, designers, engineers, and marketers have created ideas in a vacuum—the vacuum of their own tastes, knowledge, prejudices, and beliefs. The future of customer-driven ideation is developing new and better ways to listen more deeply. Ethnography and other methods get you closer to your customer/buyer, get you into their psyche, and go beyond what people might say to be socially acceptable. Adopting some of these unconventional processes will enable you and your firm to avoid obvious mistakes and turnoffs and to enhance features that may have been given short shrift.

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Ideation Strategy 4: Focus on the unarticulated needs of customers.

To align your products, services, and customer service practices more closely with customers, conventional wisdom says, “assemble a focus group.” Listen to your customers for their ideas. This is fine if you want feedback on existing ideas. But it’s woefully inadequate if you want to smoke out what innovation scholars call the unarticulated needs of customers.

Here, you are really asking people to think about hypothetical products and ideas, what they’d respond to if it were available.

Consider the microwave oven by way of example. Asked why you like your microwave, you might say, “It heats things up more quickly than a conventional oven.” And if you were asked, “How do you use your microwave?” chances are you’d respond, “To heat up water for tea” or “To pop popcorn.” Maybe you’d say, “To cook an occasional frozen dinner, when I’m really in a hurry.”

You would probably not mention that you cook only certain things with your microwave. That you’d never but never try to cook a roast or a steak in your microwave, because you tried that once, and it came out looking gray and unappetizing. You might still prefer to cook a great-tasting roast in half the time, yet that desire is not something you would volunteer: it is unarticu-lated. Using ideation techniques that probed unarticulated needs, GE came up with Advantium—a speed cooker that uses white hot halogen bulbs to brown and cook the meat’s outside while utilizing microwaves to cook the meat’s insides, resulting in roasts, steaks, and lots of other items cooked in far less time than conventional electric or typical microwave ovens, but with the appeal customers want.

How Innovators at Callaway Golf Discovered Bertha

There was a time only a few years ago when golf clubs looked almost identical. One manufacturer would make a slight incremental improvement and the others would quickly follow. One introduced a new metal or a new grip or otherwise altered the design, and the others played catch-up.

But when Callaway Golf Company launched Big Bertha, it did not focus on competitors. Callaway’s developers went out to country clubs and public courses and hung around. They observed how golfers approached the game and asked how they felt about their level of skill. They talked to former 132golfers who hadn’t set foot on a course in years. They concluded that many people liked the game but didn’t play because it was too frustrating.

Callaway’s innovation team saw that people wanted to play but were intimidated. So they made a driver with a larger clubhead, which featured an enlarged and more forgiving “sweet spot.” They extended the shaft by several inches, which meant the ball would travel farther. They marketed it is as a way to make golf less difficult and more fun. The result was that new players took up the sport and a lot of the seasoned players traded in their old drivers for Berthas as well. Callaway’s band of maverick thinkers knew that the low-lying fruit of incremental improvement had been picked already. By focusing on unarticulated needs, they created a blockbuster.

Ideation Strategy 5: Seek ideas from new customer groups.

Chances are, there’s a group of people out there you consider to be your customers. If you enlarge the definition of who your customers are, you might just enlarge your ability to spawn winning ideas in the process. What about companies or people who’ve never done business with you before? What about former customers? What about your competition’s customers? And what about your customers’ customers?

Listening to Nontraditional Customers at Philips Electronics

The medical products division of Holland-based Philips asked itself a fundamental question: “Who is our customer?” Before, product managers at the firm had considered only doctors in hospitals to be their customers, since doctors made decisions about suppliers.

But managers began to look more deeply into the changes occurring within the health care industry. In so doing, they noticed that healthcare service was increasingly being delivered in nontraditional environments: the home, outpatient clinics, even on the street to homeless people. What were the needs of these nontraditional customers?

Philips soon discovered that one problem these nontraditional customers were having was hearing inside their patients’ bodies. “Hearing heart murmurs or detecting breathing problems with traditional stethoscopes was becoming increasingly difficult, because of all the noise in these nontraditional environments,” explained Jay Mazelsky, a general manager at Philips’ Healthcare Solutions Group in Andover, Massachusetts. These people 133weren’t asking for an improved stethoscope that would increase their ability to hear above the din of traffic and voices—it was an unarticulated need. Busy making the rounds, these caregivers merely made do with a tool that hadn’t changed much in 100 years.

By asking themselves “what are the needs of these other customer groups,” Mazelsky’s team was jarred into realizing an opportunity: create a diagnostic tool for nontraditional customers. Philips and its ideation consultant, IdeaScope Associates, developed the Electronic Stethoscope, which blocks out background noises, such as traffic or voices, and offers 14 times more amplification than a traditional stethoscope. One doctor who used the product noted that she could hear her own heart murmur for the first time.

Since its introduction, annual sales of the stethoscope have exceeded those of traditional, acoustic models. And the success of the product has spurred the company to think about other needs of its nontraditional customer as well.

Ideation Strategy 6: Involve supply chain partners in ideation.

How many good ideas have you gotten from your suppliers of late? If not very many, perhaps you aren’t asking the right questions. Or establishing the basis for partnering to thrive. The usual stumbling blocks to partnering include a reluctance to share information with vendors, lack of trust, complacency in existing supplier-manufacturer relationships, lack of cooperation between departments within a company, an inability to conceptualize where new opportunities might exist, lack of resources and control systems, and cultural differences. Any or all of these stumbling blocks can mean that “deep partnering” doesn’t occur. And in the vast majority of supplier-manufacturer relationships it doesn’t, according to an A.T. Kearney survey of 600 global senior executives.

A global purchasing chief at a leading consumer products company used to visit his suppliers from time to time and would always end the visit with a request: “If you have any new ideas or technologies you think we’d be interested in, be sure to let us know.” And his suppliers would always say, “You’ll be the first person we’ll call.” They never did.

This purchaser now involves suppliers in the ideation process. He begins the conversation by saying, “You know, I think in the past I’ve been a bad customer. I didn’t tell you what I needed, I only told you what I wanted. 134What I need is to know, for example, is whether you might have an adhesive that would work well on elderly skin, sensitive skin, bruised skin, diseased skin, and five other kinds of skin that we’ve identified.” By articulating its unsolved problems, he and his team have made a big difference in encouraging suppliers to contribute to the company’s ideation process. This process moves procurement from doing the merely routine tasks to adding value to departments ranging from R&D to marketing.

The new approach has been much more productive in aiding ideation: “Even one of our notoriously non-creative suppliers developed two proprietary materials for the company in the last 12 months. It’s unbelievable how excited some of our suppliers get when we ask them to be creative in our behalf.”

These firms cultivate relationships with partners using four simple guidelines:

• You must share the risks as well as the rewards.

What are the risks for a supplier in investing time and resources in your new product if it fails in the marketplace? If the supplier puts its smartest R&D people on your project and it bombs, the supplier has no way to amortize the costs of that investment with orders in the future.

• You must share information with key suppliers.

Suppliers who have earned your trust should be involved in early design stage ideation. Hold ongoing focus groups with them to solicit their feedback. The sooner you can share information about new product plans, and the sooner you solicit feedback from key suppliers on your prototypes, the sharper your market edge.

• You must engage in mutual measurement.

Establish a method by which you and your supplier both measure the effectiveness of the relationship. As with any marriage, the supplier and manufacturer must work on the relationship. Motorola’s Supplier Advisory Council is composed of Motorola officials plus 15 top suppliers who rotate on and off over time. The council deals with policy-level issues, such as which suppliers will supply which materials to Motorola at what prices, and gives Motorola the opportunity to gain feedback about what’s working and what’s not from the suppliers’ standpoint.

• You must encourage teamwork and cooperation.

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Move from a traditional adversarial relationship characterized by competition between suppliers to one of cooperation encouraged by the buyer organization. Rather than making demands, actively solicit ideas and suggestions.

Filling the Funnel is an Ongoing Necessity

There’s no question that sessions led by outside ideation specialists are incredibly fun and produce a lot of new possibilities. The only downside is that, all too often, these sessions result in only momentary enthusiasm but no genuine progress. Back at the office Monday morning, other priorities and deadlines intervene. Ideas that seemed so full of potential are never acted on. The problem is all too common in companies today—unless such funnel-filling activities are joined up to an overarching innovation process.

If part of a disciplined, comprehensive approach to innovation, regular ideation sessions and the aggressive use of other idea-inviting methods we’ve looked at in this chapter can dramatically increase the number of ideas entering your system. Your idea factory cannot convert raw materials into finished products, services, markets, and processes if they don’t get surfaced.

Before we move on, here are three questions to help you assess your firm’s adeptness with ideation.

1. Does your firm have “tons of ideas lying around” as many claim, or is the well dry? When was the last time you recall somebody organizing a session devoted exclusively to dreaming up ideas?
2. How effectively is your firm listening to customers for their ideas? And how sophisticated is your firm presently at listening for unarticulated needs that may point you toward Breakthrough Ideas rather than “me too” products and service enhancements?
3. What would it take for you personally to become your firm’s ideation expert—the person others come to when they realize that the ideas they have and the approaches they are taking aren’t really bringing the results needed? What would you do, with whom would you consult, what seminars would you attend?

As you review the suggestions in this chapter, the real question is this: What have you got to lose? It’s amazing the creativity that can result when you simply ask people for their ideas.

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Enhancing your firm’s ability to generate ideas is vital. Outside facilitators and creativity gurus can have a lasting impact on your culture, bringing increased awareness that, in fact, all of us are more creative than we realize, if only we are given the opportunity and the environment to unleash that creativity.