This post is =l=o=n=g overdue… early June, Mike Macadaan, Rob Metzger, Bill Wetherell and myself attended an Innovation Conference in San Diego. Side Note: Here I was, hoping we’d be in some hip hotel in downtown San Diego (my first time in San Diego!). No, it was away from the ocean - my hotel room had an awesome view of the freeway.
The conference was good, with some good lessons learnt from teams from HP, Intuit, Google and Qualcom. The bottom line was “no magic bullet” and “no one way”.
Ant Creed gave a great overview of the innovation he uses at Initut for Turbo Tax. Now imagine the Turbo Tax software, and imagine the subject of tax…. Everyone loves taxes, I for one can’t wait to pay taxes, it is such a joy. OK, so it’s an ikky subject at best to most people. Ant had some great examples of inspiring people, getting feedback and making the complex seem simple. Remember that “Turbo Tax” is close to Intuit's heart – it makes a lot of money. Ant gave examples of how he sparked new ideas among people – often with different backgrounds or from different departments. I’d like to have him do a brownbag for us.
Shalendra Kumar – Offshore development for HP imaging team. HP is a huge company, and the Imaging and Printing team is spread across many sites. Shalendra described how he makes new product development work – which is critical to HP in a highly competitive area. How can you bring digital imaging to India, where many people don’t have PCs? What kind of innovation can be done to bring a digital world to the mass market place.
Finally a VP (I forgot his name :-( ) from a different division of Intuit spoke about his previous experience at P&G, a very successful company. Only he talked of a failure that he learnt from, named “Fit Vegetable Wash”. a vegetable wash…. Yes, a vegetable wash. It didn’t catch on, for various reasons/ But he delivered a good message here – not everything succeeds/.
Some of my takeaways:
- Find people with passion that can help ignite others
- Bring in a diverse set of people, thatcan spark ideas. (example that Ant used : just because someone works in legal, does not mean they have no other life. When that person came to the table, new ideas, new directions came up.)
- Innovation is messy, Expect lots of failures,
- Ship early and often
- Encourage risk
- Customer doesn’t know best. They often don’t know the next best thing. (e.g. did people 15 years ago really say they needed a cell phone? Or 5 years ago a camera phone)
- Just do it. Figure it out. No one formula for success.
- Look at other people who try to reach people… how do they innovate. In this case the example was how do advertisers innovate and reach?
- Ask the customer too early, and they don’t know the answer
- Keep teams small.
Everyone can – and should – come up with new ideas, implement some, discuss others. Some will be new features, some may sound like wild ideas. Some may be duds. One or two might succeed!
AOLT launched the Innovation Grant program (check that out on greenhouse) – that’s one good way to get some of the ideas submitted – and potentially funded.
Of course, my favorite innovator is Ron Popeil. He invented Mr Microphone, the Ronco Rotisserie oven, a beef jerky machine plus something I am trying now named “GLH”, which can help solve baldness. Seriously, if you can sell millions of GLH, you must be onto something….
Innovate and customers shall follow.
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