by Robyn Bolton | Aug 28, 2024 | Innovation, Leadership, Tips, Tricks, & Tools
You were born creative. As an infant, you had to figure many things out—how to get fed or changed, get help or attention, and make a onesie covered in spit-up still look adorable. As you grew older, your creativity grew, too. You drew pictures, wrote stories, played dress-up, and acted out imaginary stories.
Then you went to school, and it was time to be serious. Suddenly, creativity had a time and place. It became an elective or a hobby. Something you did just enough of to be “well-rounded” but not so much that you would be judged irresponsible or impractical.
When you entered the “real world,” your job determined whether you were creative. Advertising, design, marketing, innovation? Creative. Business, medicine, law, engineering? Not creative.
As if Job-title-a-determinant-of-creativity wasn’t silly enough, in 2022, a paper was published in the Journal of Applied Psychology that declared that, based on a meta-analysis of 259 studies (n=79,915), there is a “male advantage in creative performance.”
Somewhere, Don Draper, Pablo Picasso, and Norman Mailer high-fived.
But, as every good researcher (and innovator) knows, the headline is rarely the truth. The truth is that it’s contextual and complicated, and everything from how the original studies collected data to how “creativity” was defined matters.
But that’s not what got reported. It’s also not what people remember when they reference this study (and I have heard more than a few people invoke these findings in the three years since publication).
That is why I was happy to see Fortune report on a new study just published in the Journal of Applied Psychology. The study cites findings from a meta-analysis of 753 studies (n=265,762 individuals) that show men and women are equally creative. When “usefulness (of an idea) is explicitly incorporated in creativity assessment,” women’s creativity is “stronger.”
Somewhere, Mary Wells Lawrence, Frida Kahlo, and Virginia Woolf high-fived.
Of course, this finding is also contextual.
What makes someone “creative?”
Both studies defined creativity as “the generation of novel and useful ideas.”
However, while the first study focused on how context drives creativity, the second study looked deeper, focusing on two essential elements of creativity: risk-taking and empathy. The authors argued that risk-taking is critical to generating novel ideas, while empathy is essential to developing useful ideas.
Does gender influence creativity?
It can. But even when it does, it doesn’t make one gender more or less creative than the other.
Given “contextual moderators” like country-level culture, industry gender composition, and role status, men tend to follow an “agentic pathway” (creativity via risk-taking), so they are more likely to generate novel ideas.
However, given the same contextual moderators, women follow a “communal pathway” (creativity via empathy), so they are more likely to generate useful ideas.
How you can use this to maximize creativity
Innovation and creativity go hand in hand. Both focus on creating something new (novel) and valuable (useful). So, to maximize innovation within your team or organization, maximize creativity by:
- Explicitly incorporate novelty and usefulness in assessment criteria. If you focus only on usefulness, you’ll end up with extremely safe and incremental improvements. If you focus only on novelty, you’ll end up with impractical and useless ideas.
- Recruit for risk-taking and empathy. While the manifestation of these two skills tends to fall along gender lines, don’t be sexist and assume that’s always the case. When seeking people to join your team or your brainstorming session, find people who have demonstrated strong risk-taking or empathy-focused behaviors and invite them in.
- Always consider the context. Just as “contextual moderators” impact people’s creative pathways, so too does the environment you create. If you want people to take risks, be vulnerable, and exhibit empathy, you must establish a psychologically safe environment first. And that starts with making sure there aren’t any “tokens” (one of a “type”) in the group.
Which brings us back to the beginning.
You ARE creative.
How will you be creative today?
by Robyn Bolton | Aug 18, 2024 | Customer Centricity, Innovation, Tips, Tricks, & Tools
AI is everywhere: in our workplaces, homes, schools, art galleries, concert halls, and even neighborhood coffee shops. We can’t seem to escape it. Some hope it will unlock our full potential and usher in an era of creativity, prosperity, and peace. Others worry it will eventually replace us. While both outcomes are extreme, if you’ve ever used AI to conduct research with synthetic users, the idea of being “replaced” isn’t so wild.
For the past month, I’ve beta-tested Crowdwave, an AI research tool that allows you to create surveys, specify segments of respondents, send the survey to synthetic respondents (AI-generated personas), and get results within minutes.
Sound too good to be true?
Here are the results from my initial test:
- 150 respondents in 3 niche segments (50 respondents each)
- 51 questions, including ten open-ended questions requiring short prose responses
- 1 hour to complete and generate an AI executive summary and full data set of individual responses, enabling further analysis
The Tool is Brilliant
It took just one hour to gather data that traditional survey methods require a month or more to collect, clean, and synthesize. Think of how much time you’ve spent waiting for survey results, checking interim data, and cleaning up messy responses. I certainly did and it made me cry.
The qualitative responses were on-topic, useful, and featured enough quirks to seem somewhat human. I’m pretty sure that has never happened in the history of surveys. Typically, respondents skip open-ended questions or use them to air unrelated opinions.
Every respondent completed the entire survey! There is no need to look for respondents who went too quickly, chose the same option repeatedly, or abandoned the effort altogether. You no longer need to spend hours cleaning data, weeding out partial responses, and hoping you’re left with enough that you can generate statistically significant findings.
The Results are Dangerous
When I presented the results to my client, complete with caveats about AI’s limitations and the tool’s early-stage development, they did what any reasonable person would do – they started making decisions based on the survey results.
STOP!
As humans, we want to solve problems. In business, we are rewarded for solving problems. So, when we see something that looks like a solution, we jump at it.
However, strategic or financially significant decisions should never rely ona single data source. They are too complex, risky, and costly. And they definitely shouldn’t be made based on fake people’s answers to survey questions!
They’re Also Useful.
Although the synthetic respondents’ data may not be true, it is probably directionally correct because it is based on millions and maybe billions of data points. So, while you shouldn’t make pricing decisions based on data showing that 40% of your target consumers are willing to pay a 30%+ premium for your product, it’s reasonable to believe they may be willing to pay more for your product.
The ability to field an absurdly long survey was also valuable. My client is not unusual in their desire to ask everything they may ever need to know for fear that they won’t have another chance to gather quantitative data (and budgets being what they are, they’re usually right). They often ignore warnings that long surveys lead to abandonment and declining response quality. With AI, we could ask all the questions and then identify the most critical ones for follow-up surveys sent to actual humans.
We Aren’t Being Replaced, We’re Being Spared
AI consumer research won’t replace humans. But it will spare us the drudgery of long surveys filled with useless questions, months of waiting for results, and weeks of data cleaning and analysis. It may just free us up to be creative and spend time with other humans. And that is brilliant.
by Robyn Bolton | Aug 14, 2024 | Innovation, Tips, Tricks, & Tools
In 2020, the International Standards Organization, most famous for its Quality Management Systems standard, published ISO 56000, Innovation Management—Fundamentals and Vocabulary. Since then, ISO has released eight additional innovation standards.
But is it possible to create international standards for innovation, or are we killing creativity?
That’s the question that InnoLead founder and CEO Scott Kirsner and I debated over lunch a few weeks ago. Although we had heard of the standards and attended a few webinars, but we had never read them or spoken with corporate innovators about their experiences.
So, we set out to fix that.
Scott convened an all-star panel of innovators from Entergy, Black & Veatch, DFW Airport, Cisco, and a large financial institution to read and discuss two ISO Innovation Standards: ISO 56002, Innovation management – Innovation management systems – Requirements and ISO 56004, Innovation Management Assessment – Guidance.
The conversation was honest, featured a wide range of opinions, and is absolutely worth your time to watch.
Here are my three biggest takeaways.
The Standards are a Good Idea
Innovation doesn’t have the best reputation. It’s frequently treated as a hobby to be pursued when times are good and sometimes as a management boondoggle to justify pursuing pet ideas and taking field trips to fun places.
However, ISO Standards can change how innovation is perceived and supported.
Just as ISO’s Quality Management Standards established a framework for quality, the Innovation Management Standards aim to do the same for innovation. They provide shared fundamentals and a common vocabulary (ISO 56000), requirements for innovation management systems (ISO 56001 and ISO 56002), and guidance for measurement (ISO 56004), intellectual property management (ISO 56005), and partnerships (ISO 56003). By establishing these standards, organizations can transition innovation from a vague “trust me” proposition to a structured, best-practice approach.
The Documents are Dangerous
However, there’s a caveat: a little knowledge can be dangerous. The two standards I reviewed were dense and complex, totaling 56 pages, and they’re among the shortest in the series. Packed with terminology and suggestions, they can overwhelm experienced practitioners and mislead novices into thinking they have How To Guide for success.
Innovation is contextual. Its strategies, priorities, and metrics must align with the broader organizational goals. Using the standards as a mere checklist is more likely to lead to wasted time and effort building the “perfect” innovation management system while management grows increasingly frustrated by your lack of results.
The Most Important Stuff is Missing
Innovation is contextual, but there are still non-negotiables:
- Leadership commitment AND active involvement: Innovation isn’t an idea problem. It’s a leadership problem. If leadership delegates innovation, fails to engage in the work, and won’t allocate required resources, you’re efforts are doomed to fail.
- Adjacent and Radical Innovations require dedicated teams: Operations and innovation are fundamentally different. The former occurs in a context of known knowns and unknowns, where experience and expertise rule the day. The latter is a world of unknown unknowns, where curiosity, creativity, and experimentation are required. It is not reasonable to ask someone to live in both worlds simultaneously.
- Innovation must not be a silo: Innovation cannot exist in a silo. Links must be maintained with the core business, as its performance directly impacts available resources and influences the direction of innovation initiatives.
These essential elements are mentioned in the standards but are not clearly identified. Their omission increases the risk of further innovation failures.
Something is better than nothing
The standards aren’t perfect. But one of the core principles of innovation is to never let perfection get in the way of progress.
Now it’s time to practice what we preach by testing the standards in the real world, scrapping what doesn’t work, embracing what does, and innovating and iterating our way to better.
by Robyn Bolton | Jul 22, 2024 | Innovation
“This time feels different.” I’ve been hearing this from innovation practitioners and partners for months We’ve seen innovation resilience tested in times of economic uncertainty and geopolitical volatility. We’ve seen it flourish when markets soar and capital is abundant. We’ve seen it all, but this time feels different.
In fact, we feel a great disturbance in the innovation force.
Disturbances aren’t always bad. They’re often the spark that ignites innovation. But understand the disturbance you must, before work with it you can.
So, to help us understand and navigate a time that feels, and likely is, different, I present “The Corporate Innovator’s Saga.”
Episode I: The R&D Men (are) Aces
(Sorry, that’s the most tortured one. The titles get better, I promise)
A long time ago (1876), in a place not so far away (New Jersey), one man established what many consider the first R&D Lab. A year later, Thomas Edison and his Menlo Park colleagues debuted the phonograph.
In the 20th century, as technology became more complex, invention shifted from individual inventors to corporate R&D labs. By the late 1960s, Bell Labs employed 15,000 people, including 1,200 PhDs. In 1970, Xerox’s famed Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) opened.
Episode II: Attack of the Disruptors
For most of the twentieth century, R&D labs were the heroes or villains of executives’ innovation stories. Then, Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen published, The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail.
He revealed that executives’ myopic focus on serving their best (most profitable) customers caused them to miss new waves of innovation. In example after example, he showed that R&D often worked on disruptive (cheaper, good enough) technologies only to have their efforts shut down by executives worried about cannibalizing their existing businesses.
C-suites listened, and innovation went from an R&D problem to a business one.
Episode III: Revenge of the Designers
Design Thinking’s origins date back to the 1940s, its application to business gained prominence with l Tim Brown’s 2009 book, Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation.
This book introduced frameworks still used today’s: desirability, feasibility, and viability; divergent and convergent thinking; and the process of empathy, problem definition, ideation, prototyping, and testing.
Innovation now required businesspeople to become designers, question the status quo, and operate untethered from the short-termism of business,
Episode IV: A New Hope (Startups)
The early 2000s were a dizzying time for corporate innovation. Executives feared disruption and poured resources into internal innovation teams and trainings. Meanwhile, a movement was gaining steam in Silicon Valley.
Y Combinator, the first seed accelerator, launched in 2005 and was followed a year later by TechStars. When Eric Ries published The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses in 2011, the US was home to nearly 1o0 startup accelerators.
Now, businesspeople needed to become entrepreneurs capable of building, and scaling startups in environments purpose-built to kill risk and change.
In response, companies spun up internal accelerators, established corporate venture capital teams, and partnered with startup studios.
Episode V: Reality Strikes Back
Today, the combination of a global pandemic, regional wars, and a single year in which elections will affect 49% of the world’s population has everyone reeling.
Naturally, this uncertainty triggered out need for a sense of control. The first cut were “hobbies” like innovation and DEI. Then, “non-essentials” like “extra” people and perks. For losses continued into the “need to haves,” like operational investments and business expansion.
Recently, the idea of “growth at all costs” has come under scrutiny with advocates for more thoughtful growth strategies emerging There is still room for innovation IF it produces meaningful, measurable value.
Episode VI: Return of the Innovator(?)
I don’t know what’s next, but I hope this is the title. And, if not, I hope whatever is next has Ewoks.
What do you hope for in the next episode?
by Robyn Bolton | Jul 17, 2024 | Innovation, Leadership, Strategy
The quest for immortality is as old as humankind. From King Gilgamesh in 2100 BCE to Jeff Bezos and Larry Page, the only thing that stops our pursuit of longevity is death. So why don’t we apply this same verve and vigor to building things that last forever? Why don’t we invest in corporate longevity?
Consider this—in the last 80 years, human life expectancy increased by almost 30% while corporate life expectancy declined by almost 500%. Other research indicates that the average company’s lifespan on the S&P 500 Index dropped from 60 years in 1960 to just under 15 years in 2024.
We spend billions on products to slow, stop, and even reverse aging. Yet, according to the New York Times, there are just seven keys to living longer.
Could achieving corporate longevity possibly be just as simple?
Yes.
Here are 5 keys to corporate longevity.
1. Take care of yourself today AND invest for tomorrow
We all know what we should do to stay healthy. But one night, you don’t sleep well, and hearing your 5:00 am alarm is physically painful. What harm is there in skipping just one workout? At work, you had a bad quarter, so cutting the research project or laying off the innovation team seems necessary. After all, if you don’t save today, there won’t be a tomorrow, right?
Right. But skipping workouts becomes a habit that can bring your retirement plans crashing down. Just like cutting investments in R&D, innovation, and next-gen talent makes keeping up with, adapting, and growing in a rapidly changing world impossible.
2. Build and nurture relationships. Inside AND outside your company
According to the Harvard Study of Adult Development, strong relationships lead to happier and healthier lives and are the biggest predictor of well-being. Turns out relationships are also good for business.
Strategic alliances and partnerships directly grow revenue. For example, 95% of Microsoft’s commercial revenue comes from its partner ecosystem. Starbucks’ collaboration with Nestle allowed the coffee chain to expand its presence in people’s lives while Nestle gained access to a growing category without the cost of building its own brand. There’s a reason that Andreessen Horowitz declared partnerships a “need to have” in today’s world.
3. Everything in moderation
Toddlers are the only people more distracted by shiny objects than executives. Total Quality Management. Yes, please. Disruptive Innovation. Absolutely. Agile. Thank you, I’ll take two.
Chasing new ideas isn’t wrong. It’s how you chase them that’s dangerous. Uprooting your existing processes and forcing everyone to immediately adopt Agile is the corporate equivalent of a starvation diet. You’ll see immediate improvements, but long-term, you’ll end up worse off.
4. Eliminate bad habits (and bad people)
“The culture of any organization is shaped by the worse behavior the leader is willing to tolerate.”
Read that again. Slowly.
To live longer, stop engaging in, tolerating, and justifying bad habits. To make your company live longer, stop tolerating and justifying people and behaviors that contradict your company’s culture. Eliminating bad behavior is tough, but it’s the only way to get to your goal. In life and in business.
5. Rest
Getting 7-8 hours of sleep a night adds years to your life. Less than five hours doubles your dementia risk. More sleep also boosts your productivity and creativity at work.
The latest example of rest’s power is the four-day workweek. In 2022, 61 UK companies adopted it without any changes in pay. Two years later, 54 still have the policy, and over 30 made it permanent. Other companies, like Microsoft in Japan, reported productivity increases of more than 40%.
What will you unlock with these keys?
As a leader, you have the power to build a legacy and a company that thrives for generations. But that only happens if you channel the same energy into achieving corporate longevity that you put into pursuing a longer, healthier life.
By embracing the keys of corporate longevity—caring for today while investing in tomorrow, nurturing relationships, practicing moderation, eliminating bad habits, and prioritizing rest—you’ll build businesses that endure.
The journey to corporate immortality starts with a single step. What’s yours?
by Robyn Bolton | Jun 26, 2024 | Innovation, Leadership, Strategy
It’s not easy leading innovation. Especially these days. You need to do more with less. Take risks while guaranteeing results. Keep up with competition through incremental innovation and redefine the industry with radical and disruptive innovation. It’s maddening. Until you find the Goldilocks Zone of adjacent innovation.
Adjacent Innovation: From Middle Child to Just Right
As HBS Professor Regina E. Herzlinger and her co-authors point out in a recent HBR article, the US is in the midst of an innovation crisis. The cost of lost productivity, estimated at over $10 trillion between 2006 and 2018, is a stark reminder of the economic consequences of a lack of innovation. This figure, equivalent to $95,000 per US worker, should serve as a wake-up call to the importance of innovation in driving economic growth.
The authors identify the root cause of this loss as the ‘polarized approach companies take to innovation.’ While companies focus on incremental innovation, the safe and reliable oldest child of the innovation family, the VCs chase after radical, transformative innovations, the wild, charismatic, free-spirited youngest child. Meanwhile, adjacent innovation – new offerings and business models fo existing customers or new customers for existing offerings and business models – is, like the middle child, too often overlooked.
It’s time to rediscover it. In fact, it’s also time to embrace and pursue it as the most promising path back to growth. While incremental innovation is safe and reliable, it’s also the equivalent of cold porridge. Radical or transformative innovation is sexy, but, like hot porridge, it’s more likely to scorch than sustain you. Adjacent innovation, however, is just right – daring enough to change the game and leapfrog the competition and safe enough to merit investment and generate short-term growth.
Proof in the Porridge: 4x the returns in ½ the time
Last year, I worked with an industrial goods company. Their products aren’t sexy, and their brands are far from household names, but they make the things that make America run and keep workers (and the public) safe. The pandemic’s supply chain disruptions battered their business, and their backlog ballooned from weeks to months and even years. Yet amidst these challenges, they continued to look ahead, and what they saw was a $6M revenue cliff that had to be filled in three years and a product and innovation pipeline covered in dust and cobwebs.
From Day 1, we agreed to focus on adjacent innovation. For four weeks, we brainstormed, interviewed customers, and analyzed their existing offerings and capabilities, ultimately developing three concepts – two new products for existing customers and one existing product repositioned to serve a new customer. After eight more weeks of work, we had gathered enough data to reject one of the concepts and double down on the other two. Three months later, the teams had developed business cases to support piloting two of the concepts.
It took 6 months to go from a blank piece of paper to pilot approval.
It took just another 12 months to record nearly $25M in new revenue.
Those results are more than “just right.”
Be Goldilocks. Pursue Adjacent Innovation
Every organization can pursue adjacent innovation. In fact, most of the companies we consider amongst the world’s “Most Innovative” have that reputation because of adjacent innovation.
How will you become your organization’s Innovation Goldilocks and use adjacent innovation to create “just right” growth?
