In every field, the leading company is the seen to be the innovator. Until now, innovation has been considered as some kind of black art. Managers of today’s world still lack the metrics that are required to take informed decisions about the innovative programs. There are some metrics that have developed for the development of new product. But these metrics are very limited. Managers are not fully equipped with the right metrics to measure the innovativeness of a particular program.

There are quite a few reasons that support the importance of innovative metrics for the development of a company. Firstly, they help the mangers to come up with an informed decision that is based on objective data. This is valuable because certain projects might have be long term and might also have risks attached to it. Also metrics affect behavior of the employees by aligning goals and actions that are in the best interest of the organization or company.

Most of the companies that measure their innovativeness do so with the help of Research and Development or by product development metrics. These might be useful but are limited in their scope as they are not capable of measuring the overall effectiveness of the innovations on the company. While paying attention to technological development, often innovation related to business concept is neglected.

There should be a framework for the selection of metrics that can help the mangers to track the success rates of innovation in the companies. These metrics would be helpful for the senior executives to assess the innovativeness of the company which will combat the dangerous strategy decay that afflicts the business of a company. Strategies might decay due to various reasons and hence innovation is the key of success for any company.

Companies that are not able to innovate for themselves must learn to buy it. For example, if company’s main product is out of demand then it can buy a lesser company whose products are still in demand. However, this innovation strategy is good only for a short term. In order to innovate things by themselves, the companies should have a balance between investment in the current business and innovation. The company should also assess the capability of the company to turn its resources of innovation into business opportunities. Also the leadership of the company has to be assesses in terms of its supportiveness towards any innovation.

Innovation metrics is important, because it is not really possible to manage something by measuring it. Innovation metrics is a tool to motivate the managers and leaders of the company to embrace innovation and give it priority. The goals of innovation need to be communicated and rewards for achieving milestones should be set. This helps in the acceleration of the pace of ideas that can be implemented. Innovation metrics can be applied in various fields in the company including process, planning and people.

Critical thinking is:

Analytic, probing, questioning, testing. Judgmental – it determines whether ideas meet criteria for success or further consideration. Selective – it makes choices.

Tim Hurson recently provided me with some very interesting insights about how to think better.

Vern Burkhardt (VB): How did you create the name of your company: thinkx intellectual capital?

Tim Hurson: The name thinkx (pronounced “think-ex”) came from the notion of raising the power of thinking. First, I thought of think squared, then cubed, then to the nth power, and eventually to the xth. Think-ex also made me think of “think exponentially”, which is one of our cut lines (along with “raising the power of people’s thinking”). The “intellectual capital” part of the name was an incorporation of one of our original tag lines (“raising intellectual capital” which was a play on the notion of raising capital). If you can raise one kind of capital, why not another? Since that’s exactly what we do in our training programs, it seemed apt.

VB: In your book, Think Better, you capture the reader’s attention by saying in the preface that “success in our business, professional, and personal lives is less a matter of what we know than of how we think”. Could you share with us the best example you have seen that demonstrated the creative power of “how we think”?

Tim Hurson: Here’s one. WL Gore is essentially a science, engineering, and technology company. Yet its biggest commercial breakthrough was based on an innovative idea, their now-famous “GORE-TEX — Guaranteed to Keep You Dry” tags, which catapulted the company into the consumer clothing market. They overcame the challenge of selling their fabrics to other businesses by appealing directly to consumers. This was the first example of the Intel-Inside style of advertising, which is now fairly ubiquitous. What we know is about the past. How we think is about the future.

What we know is what we’ve always done. What we don’t yet know is where the opportunity lies. In order to exploit the realm of what we don’t yet know, we have to be able to think flexibly, tolerate ambiguity, and generate new connections. That’s what productive thinking is all about.

VB: You said that the unexpected connection has brought us every innovation we’ve ever created. Could you explain?

Tim Hurson: The Ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus, who lived in the 6th century BCE, said “The unexpected connection is more powerful than one that is obvious.” My sense is he meant that seeing the new is simply a matter of seeing new connections between old things; in other words, seeing old things in a new way, being open to possibilities.

All of us have had unexpected connection moments. One of my favorite stories is about Thomas Edison who observed ripples on the surface of water in a glass. Of course, this is caused by sound vibrations, and anyone who’s seen Jurassic Park will recognize this phenomenon. Edison made an incredible unexpected connection while daydreaming and seeing these ripples. If sound vibrations could make the surface of the water ripple, what would happen if he could somehow freeze these ripples? Could he reconvert them into sound? He tried it first with tin, capturing the vibration of a needle and allowing it to etch into the soft metal. When he attached a megaphone to the needle that was being vibrated by these etches, he heard the sound! The world’s first recording machine. Amazing. The principles of Edison’s unexpected connection are now an integral part of our work, play, and even spiritual lives.

VB: In your book you talk about harnessing monkey mind, taming the gator, and cutting the elephant’s tether. Could you please explain these powerful analogies?

Tim Hurson: All of us have experienced monkey mind, our thoughts flitting about like monkeys swinging from tree to tree. Often when we are drifting off to sleep, or driving, or exercising, monkey mind is the only kind of mental activity we perform. It’s interesting, but it’s very fleeting. Often we have our “best” ideas when in a monkey mind state, but the ideas are so ephemeral that we lose them. Wouldn’t it be great to harness the power of monkey mind and capture those hundreds and hundreds of great ideas, and at least allow them to be examined to see if they are worth pursuing? Think Better offers various ways to harvest monkey mind ideas.

All of us have also had gator brain experiences. The gator brain is that primitive part of our brain that can only fight or flee. When someone offers a new idea to us, we almost always react with gator brain. Either we flee from it or we fight it off. We can’t help it. We’re hard-wired to respond first from our gator brain. But if we always do that, we will reject ideas that can be useful. So we have to simply recognize when gator brain happens so we can use our wills to rise above it. Think Better offers a wide variety of tools and perspectives to recognize and then counteract gator brain reactions.

Finally the elephant’s tether. We are all trapped by our patterns of thought, patterns that are so deeply ingrained that we don’t even recognize them as patterns. Think Better is about breaking those patterns using a deliberate, repeatable process.

VB: Your description of the limitations of kaizen, which is characterized by incremental change, was very informative. You coined the term “tenkaizen” and you clarified that the value of productive thinking is that it leads to new ideas and breakthrough change. You also said the overarching principle of this type of thinking is that critical thinking and creative thinking have to be separated. Could you explain this important distinction and why it is so important to productive thinking, especially in a highly competitive and rapidly changing world?

Tim Hurson: Tenkaizen or good revolution is a deliberate way of looking for breakthrough change. One of the easiest ways of accomplishing tenkaizen thinking, by which I mean productive thinking, is to separate creative from critical thinking. In creative thinking we are essentially generating ideas, often wild, crazy, half-formed ideas; often the kind of ideas that monkey mind produces. If we try to judge these ideas with critical thinking too soon, we will kill them. But if we simply record these ideas, in other words make lists of them, without judging, assessing, or even discussing them, then we have the opportunity to revisit our ideas, after having generated a long, long list, to evaluate them.

This simple division of thought, does a couple of things. It allows monkey mind to do what it does best, swing from idea branch to idea branch completely unencumbered. It encourages one idea to build on another, and it eliminates or at least drastically reduces idea ownership. By the time you’ve generated a long list, who knows who’s responsible for which? And that’s great, because it begins to take ego out of the equation.

Now when you revisit the ideas to evaluate them, you can begin to look at them usefully. Think Better offers a particularly powerful tool, which allows people to extract the core practical ideas from what at first appear to be wild and crazy, even insane ideas. This tool is called “What’s UP” and often produces the very best ideas in productive thinking sessions. In order to use What’s UP, however, an idea – even a crazy one – has to stay alive long enough so the tool can be applied. By deliberately separating creative and critical thinking, this can happen.

VB: You made an interesting play on words: ‘More often than not, people who “know” are also people who “no”’. Could you talk a bit about how this is an obstacle to productive thinking?

Tim Hurson: What I mean by this is that so often new thinking is squelched because we know or think we know already. By adopting what Shunryu Suzuki once called “Beginners Mind”, we can be accepting of new ideas. We don’t have to approach everything as though we are experts. As Suzuki said, “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities. In expert’s mind there are few.” We need to practice what I call staying in the question, as opposed to jumping to the answer, so we can keep our minds open to these possibilities. (Vern’s note: Shunryu Suzuki was a Soto Zen priest in Japan. He lived from 1904 to 1971).

VB: Related to the notion that “uncertainty is pain” you introduce the concept of “satisficing”. What does it mean?

Tim Hurson: Satisficing is a term coined by the economist Herbert Simon to describe the human tendency to feel so uncomfortable with unresolved situations that they jump to the first solution that takes us out of our misery. We often do that in brainstorming sessions. The first right idea is such a relief that we stop thinking about other possible solutions. We satisfice on the first right idea. But this cuts out the possibility of the second, third, tenth or hundredth “right” idea, which are in all likelihood much better ideas!

VB: Why is the word “else” one of the most powerful words in the productive thinking vocabulary?

Tim Hurson: “Else” is a way of exploring more options. What else, who else, why else, how else, when else, where else…and so on. All of these give new perspectives on ideas. Else simply means try again! And by trying again, we give ourselves the opportunity not only to come up with new ideas, but to understand them better once we do.

VB: The six step process that you outline in the Productive Thinking Model, beginning with “what’s the itch”, provides a systematic approach to solving a problem. You use the term “entraining” to encourage the reader to engage in behavioral change — to actually use the model. What did you mean when you said that training, as practiced in corporate America, is an astonishing waste of resources?

Tim Hurson: Well, in most organizations, I’ve noticed that training looks something like this: send people away for a couple of days, pour some good ideas into them, then send them back to work in the same environment, with the same people and with the same tools and with the same problems they left a few days before. Do we actually expect people to behave differently under those conditions? Isn’t it obvious that even if they try the new ways for a little while they will rapidly fall back into doing what they’ve always done? Without specific and sustained reinforcement of new skills, the new skills quickly dissipate.

What I call entraining is a way to approach skill development in a meaningful, effective, and long-lasting way. Entraining involves the creation of organizational structures; the use of new language to describe the new attitudes, skills, and behaviors; quick wins to reinforce the value of the new skills; and practice to embed the skills into habits.

VB: You indicated that occasionally you have seen use of the Productive Thinking Model fail. What were some of the reasons for failure, and how might failure have been avoided?

Tim Hurson: Most often the model fails when people don’t use the “I3″ test to determine if productive thinking is appropriate. “I3″ stands for Interest, Influence and Imagination. If there isn’t sufficient interest in tackling the challenge at hand, then no amount of productive thinking will change anything. If the people trying to solve a problem have no influence over it, in other words it’s under someone else’s control, there’s little chance they can affect change. And if the solution doesn’t require imagination, in other words if there’s a perfectly good “off the shelf” solution available, why not take it?

VB: And you can help organizations develop the necessary skills to engage in productive thinking?

Tim Hurson: My company, thinkx intellectual capital, provides toe-in-the-water seminars and workshops to begin the process of awareness of new ways of thinking. We also provide more intensive programs to help people understand and develop the skills they need to think more productively. We also teach people how to facilitate the productive thinking process. Finally, we have a suite of entraining programs designed to help organizations make the cultural changes necessary to maximize their productive thinking capacity so that they can become truly innovative organizations.

Conclusion: Think Better provides a guide to train oneself to think more productively, more creatively, and more successfully:

Think about “what’s going on” – understand the issue, its impact, what you know, what you need to know about its causes and dynamics, who influences the issue, who it may affect, and the likely future if the issue is resolved. What is success – imagine an ideal future in which your issue is resolved, and establish clear, observable success criteria to evaluate potential solutions. Some quotations from Think Better are instructive: “Unless a potential future incorporates a powerful emotional pull, it will have great difficulty overcoming the gravitational inertia of the past.” “Giving ourselves permission to imagine allows us to access a huge resource of cognitive capacity that we often ignore.” “How will you know you’ve arrived at your destination if you don’t know what it looks like?” What’s the question – Tim Hurson wrote “In my experience, one of the most common reasons that programs, products, and change initiatives don’t work is that the wrong question has been asked. Generate answers – cull, cluster, combine, clarify, and choose. Forge the solution – compare your three or four most interesting ideas with your success criteria, choose the most promising ones, then analyze, improve, and refine them into a “robust” solution. Align resources – “Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” (Sun Tzu, The Art of War).

Tim Hurson states that the ability to think better will become the most significant competitive advantage for companies and individuals. After reading his book one can only conclude that we need to learn these skills.

Last week we discussed how to effectively manage “missing the mark” when it comes to your new product, advertising campaign, and general innovation and growth portfolio. This week we will talk about how to effectively manage product/service rollouts in order to obtain the maximum ROI from your campaign.

Manage Your Rollouts Effectively

Strong companies will take a look at the average ROI on products and services that they introduced over the last period and make judgments based on what they discover. Often times, they will discover that, although their average ROI was high enough to keep them profitable, they weren’t realizing maximum benefits due to the rollouts of too many unprofitable products. A good marketing executive will look at the products and services available and realize which have the most potential for the least cost.

Far too often, executives will attempt to introduce too many products or services to the market but find that the project bottlenecks at the “resources” level. Before introducing a product or service, research must be done on the market, available supplies, etc. Research and development are also costly upfront costs when creating a new product. Manufacturing, shipping, advertising – all of these involve money that must be spent before the product can even hit the market, before a single dollar in profit is realized.

By minimizing your product rollouts every year, and limiting them to only those with the highest potential ROI, your company can grow financially. Managers must use what is called the “Effort to Benefit Tradeoff” when making their portfolio management decisions. Too many projects that involve high costs in R&D or manufacturing being rolled out in the same year will decrease the overall ROI of your portfolio. Having a good market sense and forward looking vision will allow marketing managers the foresight necessary to select the products with the highest potential ROI’s.

In next week’s article Delivering on Target we will discuss the last major problem that can arise with your growth portfolio, which is the failure to deliver on target.

Copyright (c) 2008 Jackson Kern

Even set against the standards established by today’s behemoths of international trade and commerce, The Monsanto Company is a veritable giant. Since its founding in 1901, Monsanto has advanced through various embodiments, most often as a producer and purveyor of chemicals. Its many mergers and acquisitions have often dramatically altered the scope of its operations, and as the twentieth century came to a close Monsanto began a transition of its principal role from that of a chemicals company into a formidable biotechnologies operation where she remains today. Following this transformation Monsanto has sought to portray itself as a soldier of the sustainability cause; on its homepage a brief description asserts that “We apply innovation… while also reducing agriculture’s impact on our environment.” Monsanto maintains 17,500 employees around the globe, and recorded revenues of US$7.344 billion in 2006. And yet all is not well in the corridors at Monsanto headquarters in Saint Louis.

Monsanto continues to carry the baggage of some dubious legacies which predate its biotechnologies reincarnation. Amongst them is the Texas City Disaster, a 1947 explosion during loading of its fertilizers at Galveston Bay which is considered the largest industrial accident in American history. In the years of the Vietnam War Monsanto supplied the defoliant Agent Orange to the United States Armed Forces for use in its herbicidal warfare program. In a 2002 report Monsanto was identified by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as being a “potentially responsible party” to the contamination of 56 industrial sites. Its popular “Roundup” glyphosate herbicides are cited in a number of studies as causes of cancer (though a number of countervailing studies refute these claims). Monsanto has been accused or implicated in a litany of cases of adverse health effects on both employees at its plants and users of its products. And Monsanto’s enthusiastic use and promotion of genetically modified seeds has provoked the ire of many in Europe and beyond, where a deep public mistrust of these organisms remains widespread.

Enter Marie-Monique Robin. The veteran French investigative journalist has never earned a reputation as a scourge of corporate interests in the spirit of such crusaders as Ralph Nader; her interests and works in the past have been mostly political in nature. She was widely recognized for a book and accompanying documentary film which exposed the role of French secret services in endearing certain unsavory techniques to their Argentine and Chilean counterparts during South America’s troubled 1970s and 1980s. But with a new book and documentary film entitled Le monde selon Monsanto (The World according to Monsanto), she has executed a full frontal assault on Monsanto itself, and the corporate world may never be the same again.

I have neither read the book nor viewed the documentary, but to judge from reviews and from the author’s own comments in interviews it seems that her premise is as follows. Following her extensive three-year investigation which exposes the depth of Monsanto’s vices past and present, Robin feels that we must ask the question: “Can we believe [Monsanto] when they tell us that biotechnologies are going to solve the problems of hunger and environmental contamination?” (My own translation from the French) (source: Arte TV) In essence Robin questions the ethic, given the ignominy of its past, of allowing Monsanto to feed the world today.

The overwhelming evidence shows that Monsanto is indeed guilty of grave misconduct on many counts. Robin’s work is a product of an age in which we now expect our corporations to behave as responsible members of society, and its form and tone give teeth to this approach. Not only are these expectations legitimate and real, but the citizenry is willing to act, and act decisively, to ensure corporate compliance. The forceful way in which Robin transmits this message is welcomed, and Monsanto (and indeed any and all corporations that have committed environmental and other transgressions) is to make reparations accordingly.

However I would make the point that it is important in this particular case to divorce the instances of Monsanto’s wrongdoing from the bio-engineering industry wholesale. I am not delusional and I acknowledge that it is the profit motive and not a spontaneous and overwhelming altruism which guides firms such as Monsanto. However if the entire system is properly monitored, there are many poster illustrations of how the interests of global capitalism and the underprivileged need not be mutually exclusive. It is a fact that high-yield seeds and other varieties, readily proffered by Monsanto and others, have allowed for intensifications of agricultural cultivation. This is of particular importance in densely populated poor rural regions where the land available for agriculture would otherwise simply not be sufficient to carry the population. The consequent reductions of malnutrition have saved many lives and have improved countless others. A New York Times article dated October 2007 gives a a sense of the enormous transformative potential at hand if only a comprehensive implementation can be achieved. In this article, Celia W. Dugger shows that seed programs in Africa have fallen short not owing to deficiencies of the seeds themselves, but rather to inadequate farm economy infrastructure and local know-how. She highlights the pockets of success, and makes reference to India’s “Green Revolution” of the 1960s and 1970s that enabled the feeding of hundreds of millions of people. India’s success, she says, is attributable to the stronger farm-economy foundation with which it was endowed.

These truths serve as a telling example of the dangers that are inherent if we allow cases of corporate negligence and neglect to necessarily sink the entire ship. We can and must showcase specific outrages and demand redress, but it would be a mistake to paint an entire industry with the toxic brush. As with pharmaceuticals, the bio-engineering industry must be allowed and encouraged to continue its work with aid and input from philanthropic and other organizations, and under the oversight of national and international bodies of governance.

We must demand accountability where accountability is often refused. But in the spirit of equity, we must also give credit where credit is well due.

One way to establish market differentiation is through the introduction of innovative new products. Establishing that differentiation is one thing, but maintaining it is quite another. Here we have put together a ten part series on how to generate higher returns from your innovation investments.

From our series of highly informational articles, companies will learn: how to treat innovation as a cross-functional business process, how to align innovation execution and business strategy; how to create sustainable innovation; how to train your senior executives to successfully execute innovation initiatives; how to effectively manage process and project management; how to measure performance of your processes; how to ensure broad stakeholder buy-in; how to understand the importance of product roadmaps; how to provide the tools necessary for successful product innovation; and finally, how to ensure that portfolio management coincides with process management.

Here is one of the ten practices that leading innovators use to increase the payback from innovation spending: Providing the Tools Necessary for Successful Product Innovation.

Providing the Tools Necessary for Successful Product Innovation

Give your teams the tools they need to succeed. Once an organization commits to putting a process in place to manage and execute on innovation, there are a variety of tools that can help ensure successful adoption. One increasingly popular way of enabling process adoption and adherence is the use of innovation management software.

Currently available product innovation solutions offer a broad range of capabilities, including support for roadmapping, idea management, process automation, resource planning, and portfolio management. The best of these systems are typically valued because they:

1. Centralize business metrics and product data so that distributed development teams can have access to the same information.

2. Streamline communication and execution of the innovation process among cross-functional team members.

3. Save time by enabling reuse of data and encouraging knowledge-sharing across divisions and business lines.

4. Facilitate strategic decision-making by allowing senior executives to easily review and prioritize projects based on their projected value to the organization.

Glatfelter is a global producer of specialty papers and engineered products. The company’s offerings are used for everything from books and postage stamps to tea bags and flooring overlays. Glatfelter’s critical business challenges included commoditization of core product lines; declining product demand within traditional markets; pressure to speed creation of new products; and an escalating need to enter new markets.

Glatfelter responded by examining core aspects of its research and development strategies and practices. It was apparent that long-term growth and profitability would depend on creating new, commercially viable products with enduring customer appeal. The company chose to implement a new, better-defined innovation process, along with a technology solution that would automate that process and help Glatfelter’s executives prioritize innovation projects based on their potential value to the company.

When the system was introduced, there were nearly 200 projects in the development queue. Through use of its new process and the supporting software, Glatfelter was able to allocate more resources to the top ten most commercially promising innovation projects. In three years, the company achieved a twenty-five percent reduction in average time-to-market; a fifty-five percent increase in new product success rates; and a 500 percent increase in the number of new products introduced. Most impressive of all, during that same period, fifty-three percent of Glatfelter’s total net sales came from new products. The overall impact of the initiative was to make Glatfelter one of the largest and most diverse suppliers of specialty papers in the world.

Much like Glatfelter, other organizations are realizing as much as forty to sixty percent more revenue and profit from new products than their industry peers. Yet, recent studies indicate that more than half of senior corporate executives are dissatisfied with their organizations returns on innovation investments. To learn more about what sets these companies apart, look for the next article from our ten-part series: Ensuring that Portfolio Management Coincides with Process Management. We will additionally discuss the top practices that leading innovators use to increase their returns on innovation spending.

I once saw a t-shirt that said, “Innovation Or Extinction”. Though cost cutting and efficiency contribute towards the success and growth of any business, it is innovation that is the key factor that drives sustainability and profitability. Only those businesses that continuously offer innovative products, services or processes can enjoy long-term success.

In order to stay ahead of the competition businesses need be innovative at the front-end, which is concept development as well as the back-end, which involves implementation of those concepts. However, this can prove to be problematic for many managers mainly because it is at odds with the analytical and rational processes they have studied in business school. Innovation is about making non-linear jumps and learning to take the available information and transforming this raw material into workable concepts. That is the secret of why, given the same set of circumstances, many businesses succeed while others fail.

New ideas drive innovation, which if implemented, drives business growth. Globalization has given rise to increasing competition and businesses that do not innovate, can rapidly get left behind in the race to the top. Without new ideas and new products, consumers could soon get tired of the product or service you are offering and could get tempted to move on to your competition. With no other incentive to be loyal to your product, the consumer will either look for a new product-offering or for a better price. With nothing else to offer, you will be forced to lower your price, decreasing your profit margins. If this strategy still does not manage to lure customers, you will be under pressure to reduce the price further, creating a negative cycle that could be hugely detrimental to your business. The only way to break out of this cycle is to stay continuously innovative and add value to your product.

Businesses that are constantly innovative attract the most talented employees who feel encouraged to show some initiative in voicing new ideas and implementing new processes. If employees are not given the opportunity to create or test their ideas, they will move on to the competition, taking their ideas with them.

Copyright (c) 2008 Jennifer Selby Long

Earlier this week, my husband and I spent time with my sister and her family near Portland. What on earth does this have to do with innovative companies? Read on.

On Sunday, my nephew, Logan, was busily working on a homework assignment with his friends Ryan and Dillon. It was amazing what these three sixth-graders were doing. They created a video about the Himalayas, complete with slides culled from the internet, homemade cardboard mountains, a painted-foam demonstration of how the mountains were formed, an action sequence involving India moving through the ocean to join the Asian continent, detailed explanations about the earth’s crust, and the grand finale – Indian music played in unison on a cello, electric guitar, and trumpet. O.k., it was an, um, unusual way to score the piece, but I had to admire their boldness in charting new musical terrain.

It was amazing how much innovative thought these three kids put into their creation and in bringing it to the market (the market in this case being their teacher, Mr. Lee).

Even more amazing was the all-out fanatical mobilization of eight adults (all of the kids’ parents, plus Kirk and myself) to execute the project after it hit an enormous speed bump. After spending hours trying to get their video on to a DVD for the class, Logan asked for help. Many hours later, the various parents who had tried to figure it out threw in the towel, got a little sleep, and went to work.

Since they were unable to transfer the video to DVD, my sister gave up her computer for the day (the one she needs for her business, by the way), so Logan could take it to class to play the video.

The kids tried to get the volume high enough for Mr. Lee to hear, but he couldn’t hear it, and admonished them for wasting 30 minutes of class time. Believe me, I had a few choice words to describe Mr. Lee at that point, none of which can be printed in this newsletter.

He did, however, give them one more night to fix the problem.

That evening, as the tension mounted, it was an all-out technical SWOT team attack. Luckily for my family, I married an IT guy.

Even though Kirk doesn’t do much hands-on work with computers these days, he dove in and started problem-solving, eventually finding an obscure program that was out on the internet, which he downloaded and used to transfer the video to DVD. He is now the family hero.

In all, we estimated that the kids spent 15 hours creating the video and at least four more trying to transfer it to a DVD, and the adults spent a whooping 18 hours bringing the creation to life, while also pursuing their other work responsibilities, the ones associated with our jobs, that is. We were tempted to send Mr. Lee an invoice.

Now, here’s the connection with innovative companies. Doesn’t this make you wonder how the naturally creative and innovative processes of children, and the rabid enthusiasm of parents to support their kids’ innovation, turn into the idea-crushing, soul-smashing bureaucracy of the workplace?

The pithy answer is that companies and markets are bigger and a lot more complicated, and adults don’t care about their own ideas as much as their kids’ ideas, and there’s some truth in all that.

However, some companies do manage to pull off significant innovation, much to their advantage. It comes down to a dozen factors that are directly correlated with innovation. Some of them are obvious, while others are surprising. They are:

1. Support and encouragement of taking risks rather than maintaining the status quo. In the words of Guy Kawasaki, “Don’t worry, be crappy.”

2. A corporate leadership team that plans for most of the company’s growth through the development of new products and services, and is diligent in ensuring that the best ideas are exploited and less promising ideas killed early on.

3. Inspirational leadership with an inspirational vision.

4. High trust relationships, relatively free of interpersonal conflict.

5. Investment in and encouragement of skill development at all levels.

6. Substantial, sustained information sharing, which creates well informed employees. These employees can apply their extensive knowledge of customer desires, the company’s goals and strategies, and competitive threats to improve their own work, as well as offer innovative solutions beyond their own immediate area of responsibility.

7. Family friendly or “life friendly” work practices. Some examples are flexible office hours, child care, part-time arrangements, or telecommuting. Take note: this one I found through quite a bit of research, not through my direct experience, and it amazed me that it was directly correlated with innovation. I had always seen this as an all-around good idea for attracting and retaining employees, but did not realize that it is directly correlated with innovation success. Go figure. I learn something new every day.

8. Demonstrable valuing of differences. This includes the traditional dimensions such as gender, race, physical disability, etc. as well as the less visible dimensions, such as different ways of thinking or approaching the work to be done, different personal values, religious or spiritual beliefs, different lifestyles, etc.

9. Semi- or fully autonomous teams, who are free to solve most problems and make decisions on their own or by working directly with other teams — without escalating to management for approval. This can and should include decisions about which of their creative ideas to further explore and which to kill off.

10. Direct employee involvement in innovation via routine team briefings with feedback, and involvement in the decisions on how work is organized and outcomes improved.

11. Goals relevant to innovation such as increase in number of new services launched, success rate of innovative products and services, decrease in non-value-added work due to process innovation, better speed to market, etc., and a means of measuring progress toward them.

12. Adequate resources to exploit ideas. Some examples include hiring temporary staff to cover some routine day-to-day functions while key team members dedicate themselves to bringing up a new business, funding market research for new ideas, and hiring process engineers to teach employees how to map and improve their work processes so they can free up more time to pursue new ideas.

As I look back on Logan’s project, I see a lot of these.

The kids never questioned the necessity of going through many creative ideas and rejecting them before landing on the winner.

I must begrudgingly admit that Mr. Lee is excellent at pushing the kids to grow through the development of something new on their part rather than rote memorization, and he invests an incredible amount of time encouraging the development of their skills.

The kids and parents have gotten to know one another well, and enjoy a high level of trust with relatively little interpersonal conflict, and they accept their children’s individual personalities as they are–quirks and all.

The kids had to work as an autonomous team, working through conflicts and making decisions without escalating to Mr. Lee.

And the list goes on.

In a way, what it takes for a company to innovate is not so different from what it takes for a kid to innovate, after all. It just takes a lot more discipline, focus, change management, and people skills.

The kids took their DVD to class the next day, and played it for Mr. Lee. They got an A+.

Sustainability; the biggest challenge that interior design is facing in these present times, in times where growth is accompanied with consequences that concerns environment. The industry is up to generating a more sustainable interior design that would complement the modern standards.

Innovation is now making its way in renovation. The designs are on the process of reborn, the concerns with regards to materials to be used and the progression involved are all facing sizable considerations.

Trend would be the best terminology to describe this process. What would be the most ideal interior design trend for today? Interior designs that are ecologically concern and friendly, that is what the industry is after for.

The materials and the process are the two important things where focus is expected to be set to. The materials used for renovation or designing are now diverged into something natural or those so called “indigenous”, materials which can easily be found and does not require too much use of chemical ingredients that would contribute for any possible pollution. The approach would be more relaxing, refreshing and nature-inspired.

The process on how to generate the design is also hot. Interior designers are now up to a deep process of conceptualization on how they would be able to save more resources during installation progression.

Marcella Enriquez; an interior designer Los Angeles specializing in commercial interior design said that the move of the interior design industry is one way of showing its full support on minifying the effects of the global environmental dilemma.

“If we would be able to impart to our clients the importance of our environment, they will learn to appreciate it and there starts their concerns. At least on our small little ways we were able to give our part” she said.

Innovating interior design will still continue, as long as it is seen that it is needed. For once the interior design is after a more sustainable way of living.

The industrial process produces a lot of garbage. Very often these processes are highly toxic or in any case not sustainable. It is just from the industry sector that comes most pollution.

Among community regulations, the Kyoto protocol, the warning for the global climate change, also the enterprises slowly have to conform to minimum standard. They can’t pretend nothing is happening anymore. This is the real challenge of this millennium. Sustainable economy is centered on a sustainable development model. This kind of economy, still unfortunately not enough developed, provide for society development being pursued able to respect the environment and use sources at our disposal to allow them regenerating. This way, also future generations will have the chance to use these resources. Unfortunately this concept has been understood too late from society, so now we are very backward for what concerns this field of development.

But there are also many enterprises that are moving to change this state of things.

The increasing market competition obliges operators to focus on product quality, without increasing costs and production efficiency, also and especially in the light of new European regulations. This is just why always more enterprises are focusing on innovation and research of new materials and new equipments.

A very important sector for the ecology is for example the one of industrial grinders. Industrial grinders can be used to reduce the volume of processing waste of: cumbersome plastic materials (bins, boxes, bumpers etc.), paperboards, wood, packaging, fruit shells and stones, leather and hide waste, bark, aluminum and steel cans, car tires, branches, and other. These machines are essential for the shredding and waste management, new technologies minimize the contribution of labor input for the loading and unloading of the shredder and the facilitation of all operations of waste recycling.

Other machines very important in this sense are also the waste compactors. The compactors are, to date, the best solution for anyone who wants to manage in a simple, secure and independent way the collection of waste. These machines are technologically advanced but very common to use, and make the disposal of waste and their recycling in particular, easier and faster.

But not just in this industry sector, in all sectors, companies aim to the design and creation of modern industrial machinery and new industrial processing that respect the environment or people, from mixers to pumps, to powder coating instead of spraying coating machines, to sustainable products pointing to a modern economic sustainable development plan. In the last years, so, we watched the birth of several innovations in this field, the creation of new machines and new technologies.

From innovative technologies for waste management to the creation of new machinery to respect the environment and of new processes that don’t harm environment or people, this is this is certainly the way forward in the future. Also, and especially at a time of severe economic crisis, to get out quickly from this moment of impasse, it is essential to continue to invest in research and development. Because it is precisely on this front that we can and must compete on the world market, not get so outdated on productions, but by innovating and offering products and services always at the forefront.

This article was written by Martina Meneghetti with support from impastatrici pane . For any information, visit impastatrici per pane or surfing on-line vendita compattatori .