In today's knowledge worker environment, the need to share and leverage knowledge and insight is critical to success. Here I discuss creative innovation and key elements for success.

1. Driving
Creative
Innovation
by Steve Massi

2. Overview
•Today’s brand environment is more challenging than ever
•Brands are looking for ways to drive business impact faster and
more efficiently
•The needs to access, integrate and activate new capabilities and
platforms are growing rapidly
•The advent of social media has accelerated this demand
•This presentation will lay out the foundations of creative
innovation, what it is, why it is important, key elements and
must do’s for success

3. What is Creative Innovation
& Why?

4. What is it – some examples
•Reynolds Wrap packet cooking
–A new use for an existing product that drove profitable
revenue and established a cultural framework for explosive
new product development
•Apple’s iPod
–A combination of existing elements/technologies, brought
together in a usable, beautiful way that exploded a category
(MP3 players)
Photos courtesy of: Reynolds/Alcoa, Apple

5. What is it – some examples
•Old Spice communication campaign
– Revitalized an old brand name by shifting target customer
(male to female) and changing typical development and
approval processes to create personal customer engagement
and excitement
Photos courtesy of: Old Spice

6. What is innovation?
•What is Innovation?
– Change that creates a new dimension of
performance. Peter Drucker (Hesselbein, 2002)

7. What is innovation?
•Innovation is not invention
– Invention can be an idea, a great idea
– Most inventions or ideas fail because they do not drive
profitability of ROI
– Most companies focus on ideas or inventions
– Innovation drives economic value*
•In economics the change (innovation) must increase value,
customer value, or producer value**
•The term innovation may refer to both radical and incremental
changes to products, processes or services. The often unspoken
goal of innovation is to solve a problem**
*Knowledge@Wharton-Sirkin
**Wikipedia

8. Why creative innovation?
•Any aspect of our business requires direct or indirect
sensitivity to creativity
•Knowledge, insight, skills and motivation should
embrace the driving concept of creativity
•All areas must strive not just to ideate or invent, but to
innovate

9. The elements of creativity
Expertise/ Creative
knowledge thinking
skills
Creativity
Motivation
Harvard Business School

10. Key Elements of Creative
Innovation

11. It starts with knowledge and insight
•Creativity and innovation start with knowledge and insight*
– More than topline knowledge, which can drive idea generation
– Must be deep customer insight that reveals true need
*Knowledge@Wharton- Huston

12. The role of tacit knowledge
•Tacit knowledge has been found to be a crucial input to the
innovation process. A society’s ability to innovate depends on its
level of tacit knowledge of how to innovate.*
•Most service industries driven by “tacit interactions, activities
and tacit knowledge”
– By definition, tacit knowledge is knowledge that people carry
in their minds and is, therefore, difficult to access. Often,
people are not aware of the knowledge they possess or how
it can be valuable to others. Tacit knowledge is considered
more valuable because it provides context for people,
places, ideas, and experiences. Effective transfer of tacit
knowledge generally requires extensive personal contact and
trust.*
*Wikipedia

13. Various industries and levels of tacit knowledge
Where marketing fits
McKinsey

14. Improving tacit interactions
•Companies boost productivity by improving the efficiency of
transformational activities (such as the extraction of raw
materials) or of transactions (for instance, the work of the clerks
in the accounts-payable function)…
•But the productivity of marketing managers and lawyers can’t be
raised by standardizing their work or replacing them with
machines*
•Companies can analyze work done in processes and root out
wasteful activities so employees do more in less time. But
companies don’t improve tacit interactions by forcing
salespeople (or other tacit workers) to follow a uniform
procedure.*
*McKinsey

15. Improving tacit interactions
•Managing for effectiveness in tacit interactions is about
fostering change, learning, collaboration, shared values
and innovation*
•Consistent, high-quality tacit interactions have a
dramatic impact on innovation and economic value
*McKinsey

16. For highly tacit, better interactions = better results
High performer
Managing tacit
interactions has
dramatic
financial impact
Low performer
McKinsey

17. Improving tacit interactions
•Top performers have figured out that by managing
tacit interactions more effectively, they can create
competitive advantages that rivals in their sectors find
hard to match…*
*McKinsey

18. Managing tacit interactions for creative innovation
•To enable and encourage an environment where tacit
interactions and knowledge sharing can flourish and
grow
– What needs to be done?
– What incentives are needed?

19. What Needs To Be Done

20. We need to move from this
Digital
Technology
Product
Research
Dev
Knowledge/insight
Account
Sales
Creative
PR/Media
Working off the same knowledge points
But With A Silo’d, Diffuse Effort

21. To this
Digital
Technology
Product
Research
Dev
Knowledge
Insight
Account
Sales
Creative
PR/Media
Powerful innovation driven by disciplined collaboration

22. Collaboration – A Key Behavior for
Innovation

23. Collaboration - a key behavior for innovation
•A key enabler of tacit interactions is Collaboration
– the recursive interaction of knowledge and mutual learning
– between two or more people working together
– toward a common goal, typically creative in nature
(Wikipedia)
Cooperation Coordination Collaboration *
Lower Intensity Higher Intensity
Short term, Informal relationships Longer term effort around a project Durable and pervasive relationships
Shared information only Some planning and division of roles Common structure and commitment to
common goals
Separate goals, resources, and Some shared resources, rewards, and All partners contribute resources and
structures risk shared rewards and leadership
*AFRL

24. Collaboration - a key behavior for innovation
•There are four working types of collaborations*:
–Progressive collaboration
• Communities of practice, knowledge-sharing sites, inter-
organizational networks
–Self-Organizing collaboration
• Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Yahoo groups
–Remedial collaboration
• Innovation or problem-solving teams, task forces, informal
workarounds
–Oppositional collaboration
• Electronic caucuses, rumor mills, external associations
*Accenture

25. Collaboration - a key behavior for innovation
•And each brings different value*:
–Progressive collaboration
• Produces value indirectly, largely by adding depth to the
understanding of a process or an activity that directly creates value
–Self-Organizing collaboration
• Helps people discover the common interests that often serve as the
precursor to value creating activity
–Remedial collaboration
• Helps achieve value when a system is incapable of monitoring and
correcting itself
–Oppositional collaboration
• Usually destroys value or dissipates it
*Accenture

26. Collaboration - a key behavior for innovation
•Enabling and encouraging a Collaborative Work environment has
many benefits:
– Creates tacit interactions
– Improves tacit knowledge transfer
– Broadens capabilities and expertise
– Helps overcome locked-in ways of approaching problems
– Encourages team participation
– Improves morale and a sense of belonging
– Utilizes human capital more effectively
– Creates an innovative work environment and culture

27. Creating The Right Environment

28. Formalizing collaboration
•Creating an insight driven, collaborative culture
– Successful collaboration is based on three key principals –
inclusion, motivators/incentives, alignment
• You can’t collaborate if you don’t include
• Create incentives supporting the right motivators
• Alignment in/of decision making is crucial

29. Include the right people
•Diversify by responsibility and personality at different points in
the process
–Encourages flexibility and imagination, discourages
Groupthink
–Include to make better decisions, provide better quality
implementation, speed implementation of decision making
•Experiment with the numbers
–In research of Broadway musicals, seven is an optimal
number for musical creation*
–Different situations will require different resources
* Brian Uzzi, Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management (Edward Boches , 10 rules for modern collaboration )

30. Create incentives to encourage collaboration
•Most organizations use the “carrot and stick” reward system
only to find it ineffective*
•Knowledge workers are driven by higher order motivational
needs*:
–Purpose
• Driven by a common cause or greater unifying purpose
–Mastery
• Desire for continual learning and improvement
–Self-sufficiency/autonomy
• Ability to perform at a high level and take responsibility for one’s
actions
*Daniel Pink: Drive, The surprising truth about what motivates us

31. Establish effective decision making
•Increased collaboration requires disciplined decision making
•Must establish criteria:
–What is the decision to be made
• Frame and split into sub-decisions if necessary
–Who will play what roles
• RASCI, RAPID, etc.
–How will decisions be made
• Voting, Directive, Consultative, Alignment
–When must the decision be made
• Consider execution and resource implementation as well

32. Summary

33. Driving creative innovation
Deep insight
Implement or Identify
challenge or
Prototype/test problem
Collaboration
to improve
tacit
interactions
Development
Alignment
skills/tools
towards
SCAMPER,
common goal
brainstorm,
or purpose
etc.
Establish
parameters for
decision
making

34. Implications for brands
•Team members must know the business reasons for
collaboration - improve the frequency and quality of tacit
interactions to drive innovation and economic value for clients
and company
•Consider investments that foster insight gathering, collaboration
and tacit interactions
– Information gathering and sharing tools/platforms,
including social platforms
– Employee training for improved collaboration and
engagement
– Behavior and outcome based benchmarks and measures for
success

35. Thanks
Please feel free to share or contact me
• Steve Massi
• stevemassi@verizon.net
• linkedin.com/in/stevemassi
• twitter.com/stevemassi
• stevemassi.posterous.com