Bo Adams's List: Innovation

• Most are stuck in a paradigm where innovation is located in “brick-and-mortar” R&D sites, when what is needed is an adaptive, globally dispersed capability to access critical knowledge from different markets, industries and emerging innovation hot spots.
• Complex knowledge is difficult to articulate and its ownership is diffuse or dispersed in a local ecosystem. It can only be acquired by learning from experience, being immersed in a particular location, growing local roots, and cultivating local relationships.
• Collaboration with local partners only adds value if the capabilities and contributions each partner brings are complementary and co-specialized so the whole is more than the sum of its parts.
• Not all knowledge needed for innovation is complex, so it doesn’t require the cost and commitment of “being there.” Foraying is an agile, flexible, and low-cost alternative to accessing knowledge (usually technological) that’s embedded in user behavior or in the local context. It involves having an idea upfront of what knowledge is required and where it is located before mounting learning expeditions to seek out the new knowledge.
• Foraying depends on having knowledgeable, open-minded, multicultural scouts who are able to assess the value of new knowledge and understand how it can be transferred and incorporated into the innovation pipeline. Much of the feasibility of this depends upon there being an overlap between the knowledge being sought and a company’s existing knowledge base to minimize the potential disruption from integrating the new knowledge.
• There are two different and complementary approaches to attracting explicit knowledge. The first involves accessing wide communities of expertise to seek solutions to very specific, well-defined problems — often through intermediary companies such as YourEncore and NineSigma. The second approach is more discovery-led. Here, companies publicly declare broad areas of interest and research in order to attract ideas from experts, entrepreneurs, and developers around the world.

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• strategically speaking, all innovations fall into one of two buckets. In one are innovations that extend today’s business, either by enhancing existing offerings or by improving internal operations. In the other are innovations that generate new growth by reaching new customer segments or new markets, often through new business models.
• first one “core innovations” and the second “new-growth innovations.”
• Innovation projects meant to strengthen the core should be tied to the current strategy and managed mostly within the main business’s organizational structure.
• New-growth initiatives push the frontier of your strategy by offering new or complementary products to existing customers, moving into adjacent product or geographic markets, or developing something utterly original, perhaps delivered in a completely novel way.
• Even a minimum viable innovation system requires that at least one person (and typically more) get up every morning and go to sleep every night thinking about nothing but innovation.
• The IWG helps innovators understand the needs of users, test prototypes, make adjustments, and then build scale. It also works to identify latent organizational innovation talent by running workshops that gather ideas from staff, patients, families, and the public and gives employees with promising proposals the opportunity to step out of their day jobs for a while to push their ideas forward. Equally important, the IWG runs an annual Innovation Expo, which celebrates innovators who experiment with new ideas, regardless of whether they succeed or fail.

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• FailCon, a one-day conference in San Francisco celebrating failure
• a company called Fail Forward consults with companies looking to examine and learn from their failures
• “Nobody wants to fail,” says Ashley Good, chief executive and founder of Fail Forward. “It’s awful. You will never hear me say to celebrate failure.” But, she added, “failing intelligently is an increasingly important skill.”

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• everyone is creative, and can learn to be more so.
• real genius, of course, is in the how.
• “I am an absolute evangelist about the value of failure as part of creativity,”
• Because academics run from failure, Mr. Keywell says, universities are “way too often shapers of formulaic minds,” and encourage students to repeat and internalize fail-safe ideas.

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• in organizations where innovation has achieved cult status, execution takes a back seat to invention
• collaboration can be derailed by individual, disciplinary, and organizational concerns—all of which can be valid.
• The skills of the inventor are rarely those of the integrator.
• In the quest for the next innovation, an organization need neither marginalize its innovation capability nor place it on a pedestal. Regular interaction between the innovation group and the implementation group yields the best innovations.

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• "When kids and teachers are given an opportunity to make, to create," Moran said, "all of a sudden you see people becoming passionate about who they are as learners."