IGNITE your…. strategic thinking Presenter – Dr. Dave Richards, experienced and highly successful serial entrepreneur, innovator and master strategist, will be presenting on “The MIT Innovation Lab: 5 key Learnings” Dr Dave is an inspirational speaker, adviser, author and globally recognised thought leader. He is honorary visiting Fellow with the Faculty of Management, Cass Business School, City University, London, co-founder and honorary lifetime member of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Innovation Lab, Fellow of the Institute of Directors and the Royal Society for the Encouragement of the Arts, Manufactures & Commerce as well as adviser to a variety of business and government leaders.

1. The MIT Innovation Lab: 5 Key Learnings
1. Ideas are Gold Dust
Ideas are a dime
a dozen, but
they’re the vital
starting point for
any innovation.
Individually they’re
almost worthless
little specks of dust. Great innovation companies
build a wide ‘funnel’ to maximize idea capture.
They look for ideas in the most unusual places
– especially outside the box, outside their own
four walls, outside their organisation. They look
to customers, end-users, competitors, and other
industries. There is no such thing as a ‘bad idea’,
other than ‘the one that got away’, or the one that
was never expressed.
2. Engagement is Key
The gold dust
must be mixed
vigorously. Creative
destruction and
reconstruction. Idea
combination and
recombination. The
greatest innovators
encourage the
wildest fights,
passionate debates, the confidence and shared
commitment that enable creative conflict.
“Politeness is the slow poison of collaboration
(Edwin Land)!” The best fights happen when crossfunctional, multidisciplinary, diverse perspectives
are brought together, passionately represented,
and not allowed out of the room until there have
been a few deaths and rebirths. The tornado looks
like chaos, but it’s actually chaos theory in action!
Engage the whole value chain early. Anyone
ultimately involved in delivering or consuming
value derived from a specific innovation should
be engaged in the process of creating it – ideally
from the idea stage throughout development. But
it’s not enough to merely bring outside people
and perspectives to the process. The magic
happens based on how they’re engaged. They
need to be motivated, creative, communicative and
collaborative. The goal is quality not quantity. A few
The Partner – May 2013
high quality collaborations with key stakeholders
will deliver more value than many half hearted
attempts with people who just don’t ‘get it’. Find
informed users who will articulately and mercilessly
criticise you. They can become your best advocates
and champions. Carefully select and build your
innovation team around these ‘lead users’, ensuring
key perspectives, intelligence and vital knowledge is
brought to the process.
3. Failure is the Greatest Teacher
There’s been
much debate
about whether
we learn more
from failure
or success.
Humans seem
to be wired to
learn from our own mistakes, rather than those of
others. Vicarious failure doesn’t seem to be a great
teacher, and nor does vicarious success – e.g.,
‘Aren’t I Great’ books. What about innovation?
There have been many so called ‘accidental
innovations’, but these aren’t examples of learning
from mistakes. They illustrate that ideas can come
from surprising places – including accidents in
the lab. However, the best innovations usually
don’t come from labs – but rather, from real world
users and their applications of tools, techniques
and technology (Eric von Hippel, ‘Democratizing
Innovation’) – very often trying to ‘correct’ flaws
in the design of products they’re using. In general,
when we try things, experiment and fail, we can
learn a great deal if we take the additional step of
deeply examining what went wrong.
When we created the Lab in 1993 as a consortium
for sharing best practices, secret sauces and
recipes for innovation leadership, we started with
success stories. However, we soon discovered we
learned more from sharing failure stories – the
more spectacular, the better! Insights emerged
from examining mistakes with the advantage of
looking across the founding businesses (initially
Nortel Networks, 3M and NYNEX). We could
powerfully apply resulting insights to common
problems – how to maximise commercialisation
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THOUGHT LEADERSHIP
Dr Dave Richards, Cass Business School, London

2. success rates and innovation return on investment
(ROI), and create innovation capabilities as a
sustainable platform for competitive leadership.
4. Fail & Succeed Quickly
As reported in
this publication
two years ago
(‘Collaborative
Advantage’,
Richards),
delaying
project launch
effectively kills eventual ROI, by increasing
development costs and reducing market
penetration. Eliminate indecision. Timing is
everything. All innovations must hit the ‘use by
date’! So launching a project quickly is essential,
but so is terminating it when it becomes apparent
there are fatal flaws.
Great innovators stand out by being particularly
ruthless. They kill good ideas quickly, focusing
limited resources on the great ideas – their future.
The key is to minimise time, attention and funds
consumed by projects that it will never make it out
the door anyway. It’s about focus. Poor innovators
allow egos, turf, ‘not invented here’, and all sorts
of other nonsense to get in the way of spotting
and killing duds. The worst scenario is when an
idea survives all the way through development
and market introduction, only to be rejected by
customers. Thanks anyway – another ‘unneeded
innovation’. How sad is that? If only someone had
asked!
5. Learning requires Memory
Another realisation we came
to shortly after we began
sharing failure stories is
that there were patterns –
repetition of mistakes – and an apparent lack of
institutional memory. By systematically creating
and applying institutional memory to the problems
of innovation, we were able to measurably,
continuously and sustainably improve our success
rates and ROI.
Patterns of errors emerged within and across
companies, as summarized in the following table.
Some of the ‘top dirty dozen’ errors listed come
from research on why innovation success rates
are so low, particularly the list of organisational
characteristics – which frankly, weren’t so
applicable to the Lab members. But in general,
even a few of the factors listed could effectively kill
any innovation. For example, the lack of effective
executive championing for an idea through the
innovation development process makes eventual
failure much more likely. The answer is to find a
champion early, and take steps to ensure continuity
through organisational changes that may remove or
defocus the original champion.
By recognising that we were making and repeating
the same sorts of mistakes, we realised we
needed to establish institutional memory. This
required ensuring experienced people were
on hand as advisors, story-telling (capture
and communication), systematised knowledge
management, and investment in training and
developing innovation leadership – both in
individuals, and as an organisational capability.
In summary, through participation in the MIT
Innovation Lab, we learned how to maximise idea
capture, engage in creative development, learn
from mistakes, do it all quickly, and apply what
we learned to maximise commercial success and
innovation leadership. And it was fun!
dr.david.r.richards@gmail.com
Organisa(onal Characteris(cs
Internal Process Management
1.
No explicit innova0on agenda
1.
2.
Lack of clear overall purpose
3.
Inadequate customer focus
4.
People not engaged in strategy
5.
Weak leadership
6.
People organised in silos
7.
3.
4.
Disempowering, blame culture –
5.
experimenta0on not encouraged
8.
Ineffectual communica0on
prevalent & tolerated
9.
Collabora0on & contribu0on
inadequately rewarded
10. LiQle or no design competence
11. Inadequate business intelligence
on customers, markets,
compe0tors & industry trends
12. Lack of systema0c knowledge
management
22
2.
External Engagement Factors
Unclear project goals – expected 1.
results & 0ming
2.
Inadequate resources applied to
deliver results on schedule
3.
Weak customer engagement
Failure to differen0ate between
users, choosers & influencers
Sales or market channels not
engaged early & oYen
Inadequate business case for
proposed ‘innova0on’
4.
Inadequate market research
No early feasibility check
5.
Lacking or ineffectual execu0ve
champion
Suppliers not engaged or fail to
deliver on requirements
6.
Market or industry experts
disinterested or nega0ve
6.
Weak project leadership
7.
Ineffec0ve teamwork,
communica0on & collabora0on
7.
Compe0tor(s) not understood or
responses not an0cipated
8.
No celebra0on of milestones
8.
9.
Design not involved throughout
Other innova0ons or trends
make the idea irrelevant
10. LiQle or no usability tes0ng
9.
11. Inadequate monitoring &
evalua0on of results
Regulatory environment
precludes or limits acceptance
10. Too many viable alterna0ves
12. Failure to terminate failing
projects
11. Can’t command adequate price
12. ‘Innova0on’ rejected by
customers
The Partner – May 2013